He didn't go to sleep. There didn't seem much point to it. Instead he got changed from evening wear into sneaking-through-the-house-in-the-middle-of-the-night wear, stuck his tools and flashlight in his pockets, checked that there was nothing traceable in his overnight bag and dropped the bag lightly out of the window.
It barely made a sound but still he held his breath for a long moment, just in case. Seemed like he was fine. If everything went the way it was supposed to, if his luck was in, he'd pick it up on the way out. If not...well, there was nothing there he couldn't walk away from, if he got the chance.
(He tried not to think that nowadays there was very little in his life he couldn't walk away from.)
Now all he had to do was wait. And try not to think about sparkling blue eyes and a smile that could light up the world.
At half three he moved. The house had been completely silent for over an hour now. Seemed as safe as he could hope for.
Downstairs and through the nondescript door in the hall that looked like it led to a closet but actually opened up into a long corridor. Now, as he remembered, he had to turn left and follow the path as it headed steeply downwards, and now he was standing at a crossroads, and left would take him to the usually unmanned security office, and straight on would take him towards the wine cellar and right...
Right took him to the vault.
Everything was going according to plan. He stepped to the left, careful not to stand on the pressure pad and confidently entered the code that would disarm the security system.
The door gave a dull beep and swung open.
There. He had five minutes before it rearmed himself. Time enough to grab the statuette and get out of here.
He ignored everything else in the vault. He had a plan and this was no time to get greedy. After a tense moment's searching, he found the statuette on a shelf. He squinted at it for a long moment. It was ugly in a strangely endearing way. Reminded him of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
With a happy smile, he took the statuette off the shelf, dropped it into the bag on his back and headed for the door.
The moment he put his foot over the threshold, the alarm started screeching.
Fuck.
He was running back along the corridor and he was almost at the crossroads and he paused because if he ran back up into the house he'd be running into God-knows-what, but there was the second exit on the other side of the basement, and that might be the way to go here, but he couldn't say for definite they wouldn't have it covered. After all, he still didn't know exactly what had set the alarm off.
The sound of running footsteps.
Time hung for a long second as he made up his mind.
And then someone crashed into him hard, shoving him forwards with violent desperation, and even as he stumbled across the corridor, the gunshot rang out behind him.
Later, he'd swear that he felt the draft as the bullet went past and buried itself in the wall where he'd been standing less than half a second before.
And she was there, her hand clamped around his arm in a deathgrip dragging him upwards and onwards. "You really go the time to stand and admire the sights?" she demanded. "Come on."
They ran.
She steered him down the corridor towards the security office, and he could hear Vince shouting behind them.
Must have been Vince shooting. And Vince hadn't come round the corner yet, so he must've been shooting blind. A ricochet. And if Danny had been standing there a second longer that bullet would have torn straight through him, and he'd have been praying he bled out before Vince went to work on him.
He guessed luck wasn't with him tonight.
And she'd saved his life and now he was following her out of here and he didn't know why he trusted her so much.
"Where did you come from anyway?" he called.
"Wine cellar," she answered succinctly.
Huh. "You get thirsty in the middle of the night?" he asked.
"Something like that," she agreed, and she turned her head and flashed a grin back at him.
He smiled at her, and right now, here, running for his life, he felt impossibly alive. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this way. And he never, ever wanted to let the feeling go.
They ran through the security office, and he turned, ready to slam the door shut, and without him saying a word she was already moving to help him, grabbing the fire extinguisher off the wall ready to wedge it beneath the door handle.
Very briefly he caught a glimpse of Vince running along the corridor, gun in hand, clad only in his blue-spotted boxers.
They slammed the door shut and exchanged a quick glance.
"Well – " she began, shaking her head slowly.
" – yeah," Danny agreed fervently.
Some things he could live without seeing.
She grinned brilliantly and jammed the door with the fire extinguisher and they were running again.
They tore down the corridor as fast as they could, and the exit to the underground garage was in front of them. He grabbed the handle. Locked. Terrific. And there was a keypad, but when he punched in the code, nothing happened.
"There's an override code for when the security system's been triggered," she said, shoving past him exasperatedly. "That's what you were missing when you left the vault. Vince doesn't have the authority to take anything out the vault, Sebastian's the only one with the code." Her tone was sharp, like she thought he should have known all this.
He should've known all this. But it was the sort of detail that usually...
He blinked, shaking his head against the familiar sensation of loss as she typed the code in quickly and opened the door.
"How did you get it?" he asked, mostly for something to say.
"Sebastian uses the serial number on his pocket watch," she explained, and Danny remembered the way she'd smoothed down Sebastian's jacket, remembered a dozen times throughout the evening when she'd been too close for comfort. Plenty of opportunity. "My car's over there," she said, leading him to a little red Porsche.
"Huh," he said surprised.
She looked at him quickly. "What?"
"Oh, nothing," he said. "Just not the car I was picturing you with, that's all."
"Uh huh." She smiled. "What were you picturing me with?"
"A Mustang," he said definitely, and he had no idea why.
The smile slid away. "Come on," she said awkwardly, turning away from him like she couldn't bear to look at him. "Let's get out of here before Vince shows up again."
That sounded like a good idea.
They started the long drive back to the city, losing themselves effortlessly amid the traffic on the freeway. It was so much busier than he'd normally expect at this time of night that he had no doubt that even if Vince had managed to follow them, there'd be no way that he'd be able to catch them. They were home free. And that was just dandy, up till the point where she'd been in danger in the first place because of his stupidity.
"I'm sorry," he said with awkward sincerity, once he'd convinced himself that they weren't going to find themselves in a high speed pursuit.
She sighed and turned to look at him. "Danny..." she began, and they both knew in an instant precisely what was wrong with that.
Danny stared. "How do you know my name?" He'd never given her his real name. Not because...he just hadn't got round to it yet, that was all.
There was a long silence. "I...knew who you were the moment I saw you," she said at last, and now her eyes were fixed on the road like she wasn't going to look away for a second.
"You can't tell me we've met," Danny said adamantly. He would have remembered. He couldn't imagine how anyone could forget.
"No," she agreed. "We haven't met. But I know who you are, that's all." She grinned but she didn't look at him. "The Benedict job and everything...you gotta know you're pretty well known in certain circles."
"Huh." He mulled on that for a while. And there was truth there, but not the whole truth. "So you got a name?" he asked.
"I've got several," she answered promptly.
He grinned. "A real name?" he clarified.
Her eyes flickered sideways. "Sammy Smith," she told him.
"Sammy..." he said out loud, trying it out.
"Short for Susan," she added cheerfully.
Short for...Oh, he wasn't going to get into that.
Besides. That wasn't what was strange here. What was strange here was that she was quick and brilliant and she dealt cards like that, and he had to admit, however much he hated her methods, she'd drawn Sebastian in effortlessly, and the way she'd got them away from Vince, the way she'd got the override code...oh, the question here was how had he never even heard of her before?
His memory wasn't like...his memory wasn't perfect, but he would have remembered hearing about someone like her. Not to boast, but he did have a reputation and people did tell him things. Someone operating on her level...he should have known her before now.
He looked sideways at her. "You're – "
" – oh, this wasn't my first dance," she assured him, sounding amused. "Not by a long shot."
Right. And that left him no further forwards. "Do you know anyone I might know?" he hazarded.
"No," she said after the briefest of moments. "I don't know anyone."
There was such pain in her voice. The same pain that had been there the first night they'd met. Without conscious thought he reached out and placed his hand on hers on the steering wheel.
She shot him a brief wondering glance, but she didn't shrug him off and they sat in silence.
It felt right. Felt comfortable. Felt like touching the stars.
He wouldn't ask anymore, not right now. He wanted to know the story – hell, he wanted to know everything about her – but more than that, he didn't want to make her unhappy.
Instead, as they drove into the sunrise, they talked about heist movies and frozen root beer, and the problems of having a robot butler, and a thousand wonderful, trivial things, and all the meaning was in the words they didn't say.
He didn't need to explain what he was thinking. Not once.
This was heaven and this was hell, all at once.
She wished it had never happened, and she revelled in each agonising moment.
This was close to being all she wanted. Close, and a thousand miles away. Every time Danny looked at her and she saw the hopeful unknowingness in his eyes, she died a little.
She had to get out of here. She had to walk away all over again. No matter how much it hurt to leave, it would be worse if she stayed.
She just had to be strong.
Yeah, right. Who was she kidding? She'd lost already.