Page 71 of Lawless in Leather

The room inside was dark and no one came running out wielding a chain saw or something equally deadly.

“Turn on the lights,” Raina suggested.

“They should be on. The storeroom lights all have motion sensors. Saves power when no one’s in them.” He waved his hand inside the door, then, when no lights came on, slid his hand down the wall, feeling for the switch. He found it and light spilled out into the hallway. Mal started swearing.

“What?” Raina demanded.

“Stay there,” he repeated.

“Is there a dead body?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then let me see.” She ducked under his arm and then froze in place when she saw what Mal had seen.

The floor was covered in feathers. Fluffy white feathers. Or bits of feathers might have been the more accurate description. The lockers that held each pair of wings were all open and the wings themselves—the bare stripped frames—lay in the piles of feathers. Some of them had been broken, not just stripped.

“Fuck,” she breathed. She shut her eyes briefly but when she reopened them, the carnage still lay before her. “Who did this?”

“Trust me, I’m going to find out,” Mal said. She felt him step closer, so her back was against his chest. Solid. Warm. Safe.

Safe was good. Suddenly the world didn’t feel so safe. “Is this because of me? Did someone do that because of me?”

“I don’t know,” Mal said. “It’s possible.”

“Someone hates me that much?” She heard the crack in her voice and swallowed. Hard. Took a breath, then another. “I need to call Brady. We can fix these.”

“Not by tonight, you can’t,” Mal said. “And we need to get the police here before you can even touch anything.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” He took her hand and pulled her gently back out into the corridor. Chen was just rounding the curve, coming toward them at a jog.

He slowed when he reached them. “What’s up?”

Mal waved a hand at the door. “Have a look. But don’t step over the threshold.”

Chen looked. Then spun back to Mal, dark eyes fierce. “How?”

“That’s what I was just about to ask,” Mal said. “What happened here today?” He looked back at Raina. “When did you last check on the wings?”

“We had some of them out for the TV spot on Sunday,” Raina said. “They were fine then.”

“So sometime between then and now,” Mal said. “And I’m assuming no one saw this on the tapes; otherwise we wouldn’t just be finding out about it now. So the question is, how the hell did someone get in here?”

“Fuck, Mal,” Chen said. “I don’t know. But whoever is must know what he’s doing.”

“There’s been nothing odd going on?”

Chen frowned. Then his face cleared. “They were doing work on one of the lighting towers this morning. The power had to be cycled on and off a couple of times on the side of the stadium. But it was only out a minute tops at any one time.”

“Long enough for someone to bugger the lock and override the motion sensor. If they were good.”

“Very good,” Chen agreed.

Raina’s stomach went cold. Very good. What exactly did that mean coming from two guys who were probably ex-special-forces. A professional? Did someone hate her enough to hire a professional burglar or whatever it was you’d call someone who could do this to screw with her?

“Go back to the office. Start running the tapes and checking the system. Everything gets checked before anyone comes through the gates tonight. Including that lighting tower. Get the police in here. Also go back over the records of any of the contractors and subcontractors we’ve had in here this week.”

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