A.k.a. Goddess

I was rolling on to and off of the balls of my feet, like a Tai Chi form about to escape. “When can I go up there?”

I wanted to see the damage for myself. I had to know if this really was random. I kind of hoped it was.

Static crackled on Officer Douglas’s radio. Then a voice: “Nobody’s here. It doesn’t look like they took anything.”

I jogged up the stairs without waiting for Sofie Douglas’s permission.

The place was trashed, all right. Sofa cushions slit. Drawers overturned. Plants uprooted in dark spills of potting soil. In some corners, my carpet had even been torn off its pad. Stunned, I headed for the bedroom, which was just as bad. All my clothes…!

“Can you tell if anything’s missing, Ms. Sanger?” asked a burly, red-haired officer. “Anything of value?”

“It’s all of value,” I said, more softly than I would have liked. “It’s mine.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean—”

But I held up a hand to cut him off. I knew what he meant. As a test, I checked my jewelry box. There never had been a lot there—even when I was engaged briefly, I used to wear the too-expensive diamond—I had few family heirlooms.

“Nothing’s missing.” I turned and noticed my bedroom TV. It was portable, but it hadn’t been, well, ported. I returned to my living room—the TV and stereo remained there, too, though they’d been upended—and looked into my office. My computer hummed steadily, monitor facedown on the floor. But…

“The CPU’s running,” I said. “I turned it off before I left home this morning.”

Officer Douglas, who’d followed me upstairs, went to look more closely at my computer. The redhead, whose shield identified him as Officer Willis, said, “Does anybody have a key to your home?”

“My parents,” I said. “Two—no, three of my friends.”

He exchanged an amused glance with the other male officer, a tall, graying guy with a mustache.

“And the lady who cleans up for me once a week,” I added. “Oh, and my dog walker.”

Willis looked concerned. “You have a dog?”

As if I would’ve hidden in my car if any dog of mine had been in jeopardy! “Not anymore. She died last fall. I just never bothered to get my key back. I’ve also given a key to my neighbor, so she can check on things when I’m gone. But she’s trustworthy. They all are.”

“Maybe I should’ve asked who doesn’t have a key.”

There were a few.

“I prefer not to empower fear,” I murmured, turning in a circle, and he snorted with male superiority. At least he didn’t use that old line about “a woman as pretty as you,” as if a decent appearance begs for trouble.

Trouble doesn’t wait for invitations.

That’s when I noticed what was left of my curio cabinet. The cabinet itself had been destroyed—lying on its side, the door yanked completely off, cherry wood splintered and every pane of glass smashed. And my collection of statues, inside…

Little more than rubble.

I took a step forward, unbelieving. Chunks of white marble were all that remained of what had once been a twelve-inch Pallas Athena, which I’d bought in Greece. Shards of lapis lazuli had been my Isis-and-Horus statue. My obsidian Shiva was many-armed rubble. My glossy, ceramic Virgin Mary had been smashed to shiny dust. Even the wonderfully fertile Venus, similar to the famous Willendorf figure and carved from granite, had been reduced to round and jagged bits.

There was no way the Venus could have broken like that accidentally. Someone must have pounded on her, hard. Repeatedly. Purposefully.

And in anger.

I’d recently read a news piece about a goddess artifact being similarly destroyed, in a museum in India, and the similarities—as well as my sudden conclusions—unnerved me.

“Wow.” Willis whistled. “What were those?”

“Goddesses,” I said. “I collect statues of ancient goddesses.”

“Were they worth a lot?”

Monetarily? Some more than others—none were originals, thank heavens. But emotionally…

Officer Douglas, from my study doorway, said, “Goddesses? Are you one of those Wiccans?”

“Not exactly,” I told her, fingering the amulet I wore under my shirt. It wasn’t a pentagram, but two interlaced circles called a vesica piscis. I wasn’t technically Wiccan. But our beliefs have surprising similarities.

It’s like I told you.

I come from a very long line of very strong women.

The police all but moved in. They made phone calls and questioned neighbors. Specialists showed up to photograph the wreckage and to dust for fingerprints, more backup than I’d ever expected for a simple break-in. When I asked if this was normal, Officer Willis said, “We’re just trying to be thorough, ma’am.”

I put up with it for insurance reasons, but mainly I just wanted to clean up. Did you know recent studies have shown that while men have a fight-or-flight response to stress, women have a hormone that prompts them to tend-and-be-friend? I hated to see Officer Sofie go, despite her leaving her card with me and telling me to call anytime. But I also wanted space in which to mourn my statues, to put things as much to right as I could…and to consider who could have done such a thing…and why.

I couldn’t help thinking this break-in might somehow be related to the recent destruction of an ancient goblet, the Kali Cup, a week before it could go on display. But that meant things I couldn’t face. Not yet.

I’d barely managed to start straightening the mess, alone at last, when a knock at the door startled me. I don’t like being scared. It goes against almost everything I believe in.

Checking the peephole and catching a glimpse of brown hair, and a familiar face in its usual impersonal mode, didn’t do a lot to improve my mood…or my lingering disorientation.

Lex.

Alexander Rothschild Stuart III and I go back. Way, way back. Worse, he makes me question my life choices almost every time our diverse paths collide. See, he’d be the dream catch for almost any woman—wealthy beyond his unimaginable inheritance, quietly handsome and, despite nearing thirty, still something of a brooding bad boy. Hard to resist, huh?

Hell, even I have a terrible time resisting him, as our roller-coaster history attests to. And I have different views on money and power than a lot of women. At least—I try.

I could also no longer trust either him or his family as far as I could comfortably spit them.

Still, there was that lack-of-resistance thing, and the intimate-history thing, along with no small amount of curiosity. It had been months since I’d so much as glimpsed him, yet there he stood, too self-possessed to even look impatient while I checked him out. Him showing up on the night of my break-in couldn’t have been a coincidence even if I believed in coincidences.

I don’t. But I opened the door.

“Are you all right?” The question came out vague and polite, as if he were making bored chitchat at a cocktail party. Lex has always had that coolness about him—he supposedly can trace his family line back to the Royal House of Scotland, by way of England, so it’s probably all that blue blood chilling in his veins. But the fact that he was here at all, much less this late, belied his nonchalance. So did the powerful energy that instantly roiled between us. “I heard about the break-in.”

“From the police?” I asked. That might explain all the special treatment, mightn’t it? “Or are you a part of the criminal grapevine now?”

He’d been accused of perjury the previous year. Worse, he hadn’t denied it. It had contributed to our latest breakup.

Now my words wrung a hint of a smile from him, an expression that, on Lex, packs a potent punch. “So may I come in? You know I need permission to cross a person’s threshold.”