Claimed

  PRAISE FOR J. R. WARD AND HER BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD SERIES

  “Frighteningly addictive.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “J. R. Ward is the undisputed queen… Long live the queen.”

  —Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author

  “J. R. Ward is a master!”

  —Gena Showalter, New York Times bestselling author

  “Ward brings on the big feels.”

  —Booklist

  “Fearless storytelling. A league all of her own.”

  —Kristen Ashley, New York Times bestselling author

  “J. R. Ward is one of the finest writers out there—in any genre.”

  —Sarah J. Maas, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Ward is a master of her craft.”

  —New York Journal of Books

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  Dedicated:

  To a couple who deserve a future.

  No matter how impossible it seems.

  Town of Walters, est. 1834

  Upstate New York

  LYDIA SUSI’S DESTINY came for her in the veil, on a random Thursday in the early spring.

  As she ran along the wooded trail, two miles into a loop that would take her through the preserve’s northeastern acreage, she was measuring the glowing line that topped the contours of the mountains. Soon, the stripe would expand to an aura, and after that, the sun would accept the handoff from the moon, and day would arrive.

  Her grandfather had always told her there were two twilights, two gloamings, and if you wanted to find your past, you went into the pines in the evening as the sun went down. If you wanted your future to come to you, you went alone into the forest in the veil, during that sacred transition of night into morning. There, he’d told her, when the distinction between that which ruled the light and that which held domain over the dark was at its narrowest, when the moon and the sun reached for each other before the rotations of their orbits tore them asunder, there was when the mortal could brush up against the infinite and seek answers, direction, guidance.

  Of course, that did not mean you got good news. Or what you wanted.

  But life was not an à la carte buffet where you could choose everything that went on your plate—another words-of-wisdom from a man who had lived to be 101 years old still smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of sima after his dinner year round.

  Why limit spring to just Vappu? he’d said.

  Lydia had never believed in his superstitions. She was a researcher, a scientist, and the kinds of things that her isoisä had gone on about did not fit in with that Ph.D. in biology she’d bought on layaway from the federal government and was still paying off.

  So no, she was not out looking for any prognostication from the universe this morning. She was getting her workout done before she headed into her office at the Wolf Study Project. With the way things had been going lately, she was going to blink and it would be seven at night. Short-staffed and underfunded, everything was a fight for resources at WSP, and by the time she locked things up every evening, she was exhausted. So Carpe Cardio was her motto and why she was out in this misty darkness—

  Lydia let her stride peter to a halt.

  Her breath pumped in clouds that captured and held the moonlight, and as a breeze came across the trail, her body did the same with the chill, grabbing it out of the air and bringing it in under her windbreaker.

  As she shivered, she looked behind herself. The trail she was on was the widest one in the preserve, a highway rather than a street, but she couldn’t see much into the trees. Pines crowded up close to the shoulders of the packed path, and the fog wafting through the craggy trunks and fluffy boughs obscured the forest even more.

  In a quick calculation, she figured she was a good three miles from any other human, two miles from her car at the trailhead’s parking area, and a hundred yards from what had caught her attention.

  There, up ahead, something was close to the ground, moving.

  Fight or flight, Lydia, she thought. What’s it going to be.

  She reached around to the small of her back. There were two cylinders mounted on the strap of her fanny pack, and she left the Mace where it was. Clicking on her flashlight and bringing it forward, she swung the beam in a wide arc—

  The eyes flashed over on the left, a set of retinas flaring the light back at her as pinpoints. The stare was about three feet from the ground and the pupils were set close together, as predators’ were.

  Lydia looked around again.

  “I’m not going to bother you,” she said. But like the gray wolf spoke English?

  The growl was soft. And then came the rustling. The animal was prowling toward her.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Except…

  Lydia kept the beam down on the fallen pine needles as she, too, walked forward. Something was wrong with the wolf, its gait wobbly and uneven. Yet the spirit of the hunter remained undeterred—and she was identified as its target.

  She was about twenty feet away when she got a sense of the fully mature male. He was filled out, at a healthy weight of about a hundred and thirty pounds, and his mottled white, gray, and brown fur was thick and lush, especially at the tail. But his head was hanging at a bad angle, and he was dragging his back paws as he continued to close the distance between them.

  It was obvious when the wolf was going to collapse. Though his head remained forward, his body listed to the side, his will staying strong even as his rear legs, and then his forelegs, gave out.

  He landed on the soft bed of pine needles on his side, and the struggle was immediate, useless paws batting at thin air and ground cover. As Lydia drew a little closer to him, he snarled, flashing long white fangs, his golden eyes narrowing.

  “Shh…,” she said as she kneeled down.

  Her hand shook as she got out her cell phone. As she called a number from her favorites, she tried to keep her breathing steady.

  In the flashlight’s beam, she could see the grayness of those gums. The wolf was dying—and she knew why.

  “Goddamn it, pick up, pick up—” Her words machine gun’d from her mouth. “Rick? Wake up, I’ve got another one. On the main trail—what? Yes, it’s the same—enough with the talking, get your ass out of bed. I’m on the loop, about two miles into the—huh? Yes, bring everything, and hurry.”

  She cut the connection as her voice gave out.

  Letting herself fall back to a sit, she stared into those beautiful eyes and tried to project love, acceptance, gentleness… compassion. And something got through, the majestic male’s muzzle relaxing, its paws falling still, his flank rising and falling in a shuddering breath.

  Or maybe it was dying right now.

  “Help is coming,” she said hoarsely to the animal.

  * * *

  Richard Marsh, D.V.M., gunned the ATV down the trail, the unmuffled engine echoing around the otherwise still and silent forest. As the tires hit tree roots, he fought with the handlebars, wrenching them to stay on course. With the wind in his face, he had to blink a lot. He should have worn goggles. Or at least not left his contacts in.

  Almost ten minutes into the racing scramble, the glow of a flashlight registered through the trees, and he eased up on the throttle. Nailing the brakes, he skidded to a stop and dismounted. His med pack was a duffel large enough to hau
l a set of golf clubs, and its weight strained his bad shoulder as he hefted it off the cargo platform and started marching into the pines.

  He stopped dead. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Lydia Susi’s long, lean body was stretched out on a bed of pine needles… next to a full-grown male gray wolf which probably weighed as much as she did. Which was a wild animal. Which was capable of anything.

  “Shh,” she said, like she knew he was yelling at her in his head.

  Rick cursed. “Move away from the wolf. You are violating every common sense and professional standard—I mean, come on. You know better than this—”

  “Just shut up and save him.”

  The woman was no more than two feet away from that muzzle, her eyes locked on the closed lids of the wolf, her running tights and shoes crossed, her windbreaker a loose bag around her upper body. Wolves could run nearly forty miles an hour, but that kind of effort was not going to be necessary to bite her. That thing could just lunge forward and sink all of its forty-two teeth into soft skin—

  “He’s cyanotic in his gums. It’s the same anticoagulant as before,” she said.

  “You’re assuming.” Rick put his duffel down and unzipped one side of it. “Now get the hell back—”

  “You are not tranq’ing him,” she hissed as she sat up.

  “And you’re not a vet. You’re also clearly not thinking. Has it occurred to you that that animal could have rabies?”

  “He’s not foaming at the mouth—” She lowered her voice. “If you tranquilize him, you’re going to kill him.”

  “Oh, okay. So I’ll just cozy up like you have and ask him for his consent to treat. He can put his paw print on the forms—”

  “Rick, I’m serious! He’s dying!”

  As she raised her voice again, the wolf twitched and opened its eyes. Rick became an instant focal point, and the animal lifted its head to growl weakly.

  “Get away from him,” Rick said in a grim voice. “Right now.”

  “He’s not going to hurt me—”

  “I’m not treating him until you’re out of range.”

  Rick rose to a stand, the tranq gun in his right hand, his trail boots going absolutely fucking nowhere. Predictably, Lydia kept talking, but when he didn’t move… she eventually did. As she finally shuffled away from the gray wolf, Rick let out an exhale he hadn’t been aware of holding in.

  Then again, when it came to the Wolf Study Project’s behaviorist, he shouldn’t have been surprised by any of his reactions. Lydia had been the outlier he had not been looking for since the day he’d met her.

  At least now, things moved fast. As she covered her mouth with both hands and curled her knees up to her chest, he discharged a tranquilizer into the animal’s flank. Due to the wolf’s low blood pressure, the sedation took longer to have an effect than normally, but soon enough, those golden eyes were closed and going to stay that way.

  Hopefully not because Lydia was right and he’d killed the animal.

  Rick brought his duffel over with him, and he led with his stethoscope, pressing the metal disk to the chest wall. Moving it around.

  “Do you have the vitamin K? You brought the vitamin K, right?”

  Lydia’s voice was right by him and he jerked back. She had repositioned herself at the wolf’s muzzle, lifting that head into her lap, stroking the mottled gray fur of the ruff. For a moment, Rick became lost in the way her fingers soothed through the—

  “Can you let me finish my exam first,” he said. “Before you start prescribing antidotes?”

  “But you have the vitamin K?”

  Rick peeled back the jowl. The gray gums, the sluggish, uneven heart rate… he knew what was going on, and not only because this was the third wolf they’d found in this condition in the last month.

  “I’ll do what is medically appropriate”—turning away, he grabbed his penlight—“when I’m ready. And can you please put his head back on the ground. Thanks.”

  As he returned to the animal, she did what he asked—sort of. She scooted to the side, but stayed bent over, still calming the wolf.

  He separated the eyelids and shined the light in. Nonresponsive pupil.

  Rick went to click off the little beam when a raindrop landed on the wolf’s cheek. As the crystalline droplet coalesced and then slowly trailed off the fine facial fur, he glanced at the sky. Strange, the moon had been showing when he’d come down the trail and was still—

  “Oh, Lydia,” he said.

  When she looked up at him, their faces were close together. So his hand didn’t have far to travel.

  As he brushed the next tear off her cold cheek, she stopped looking at him. And refocused on the wolf.

  “Just don’t let him die,” she whispered.

  Rick felt time slow to a crawl. In the lunar glow that filtered down through the pine boughs, Lydia’s face was cast in loving light, the planes and angles that made her who she was visually enhanced by the illumination. Her naturally highlighted hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail, had tendrils that curled by her ears and at her neck. And her lips were a promise of things that kept a man up at night and distracted him during the day.

  Rick now also looked away. “Of course I won’t let him die.”

  On so many levels, he was not surprised that this woman was making him promise something he couldn’t deliver on. But an inspired heart could make stupid out of anybody.

  It also made you pretty frickin’ lonely.

  But who was counting the benefits of unrequited love.

  ONE HOUR AND forty-five minutes after Lydia found the wolf in the veil, she was on the ATV heading back out into the preserve. The sun had now fully risen over the mountain range, the rays piercing through the pines and making her think of gold coins spilled from God’s pocket. Up ahead, the trail was as empty as it had been before, nothing but shadows cast by all that beautiful light—

  The engine sputtered without warning, the interruption of the smooth purr the very last thing she needed. Cranking the gas, she was relieved by a surge of speed, but it didn’t last. All forward momentum ended as the horsepower choked off and the vehicle’s heavy, knobby wheels and complete lack of aerodynamic design dragged her to a standstill.

  “Damn it,” she muttered as she tapped on the gas gauge.

  The red pin didn’t budge from the E on the far left.

  “Shit.” Dismounting, she looked up and down the trail. “Shit.”

  She resisted the urge to kick one of the big back tires, opting instead to take her frustration out by locking grips on the back grate and leaning her weight into a shove. When the ATV was off on the shoulder, she put it in park and took the keys.

  Starting off at a jog, she rounded the corner on the trail, her footfalls steady. About a quarter mile later, she came to the pattern of trunks that marked where she had seen the wolf’s eyes in the darkness. She followed her own shoe prints into the trees and stopped when she came to the disturbed place in the pine needles where the wolf had collapsed, and been treated, and finally, been carried out to the ATV.

  After a moment of sad helplessness, she kept going, heading farther away from the trail. As she went along, she diverted around the pricker bushes, the rotting stumps, the occasional fallen pine. She followed a gradual decline that took her to the water shed trough that cleaved a descent through the elevation’s west-facing flank. When she came to the river way, she looked up the pathway of polished rocks. The spring rains had not started, so the torrent that would rush over them a month from now had yet to get going. Soon, though, there would be so much more than damp sand and mud between the boulders and stones.

  Lydia jumped into the puzzle-piece-bed and hopscotched upward, leaping from flat top to flat top, keeping her balance by throwing her arms this way and that, making sure that she avoided the lichen and moss growth that could make her slip.

  Overhead, crows circled and called to each other, aviary judges that seemed to be following her and running a comme
ntary. She refused to look and acknowledge their paparazzi presence.

  Anthropomorphize much? And to think she considered herself a scientist.

  Lydia found the first dead vulture about half a mile up the riverbed. Three days old, going by the state of the remains. A raccoon was the next body. Also by the river’s edge, about two hundred yards up.

  As the going got steeper, she debated whether to continue the climb because this was real needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Taking a pause to catch her breath, she looked over her shoulder at the valley below. Cradled between the palms of the deep green mountains, a blue lake in the form of a salamander caught the sun—and gave it back. The glinting made her blink even from a distance, but how could anyone begrudge the splendor.

  In her soul, she knew it was inevitable that she would end up here. All this natural beauty, all this space… all this lack of people.

  It was also inevitable that someone with dollar signs in their eyes would fuck it up.

  On the other side of the valley, at the exact elevation she was, a half-mile section of evergreens had been cleared by machines and explosives. The ragged, raw earth and exposed granite ledge were an injury to the other mountain, something that would take a decade to patch over and partially heal if left alone. But that wasn’t the future. Off to one side, enormous steel I beams extended upward, a forest of man-made trunks that were soon to be thick walls to support heavy ceilings.

  The resort was going to sit on that site, a blight on the landscape, and service people who were looking for a “luxury spa experience.”

  Meditation and wellness brought to you by American Express and the fine folks at Diners Club—

  The snap of a stick made her turn around and go for her Mace at the same time. But she instantly recognized the tall, intense man who had come up behind her without making a sound. Until he had wanted his presence to be known.

  “Oh, it’s you, Sheriff.”

  Sheriff Thomas Eastwind was forty-ish, with strong features and long black hair that was always kept in a single braid. In his uniform, he was fully armed and in charge even out in the wilderness—then again, he was the boss of Walters. With a staff of three other officers, he enforced the law for not only all of the preserve, but the half dozen little towns between Walters and the Canadian border.