Something made him pause as he pushed open the concealed door to the lot. What was that? Sebastian frowned and tilted his head. There was a scrape across the floor, some sort of movement. The sound seemed a long way off but there all the same.
Was one of his staff working late? Had a relative turned up unannounced and somehow gotten inside? Or…Sebastian exhaled slowly. Had someone dared to enter his home uninvited? He made to turn to call his security men—who sat in their office at the end of the underground space—but changed his mind. It could be nothing after all and he was in no mood for company. Instead he clenched his fists, closed his eyes, and tried to pinpoint the exact position of the noises.
Another occurred in that exact moment, helping him. It was a tinkle, like something breaking. His eyes shot open; he lifted his head and glared upwards. Two floors up at least, almost exactly above him.
The room that held his smallest safe.
Chapter Three
Penny was in trouble. Not only had the safe, hidden behind a nude portrait, been surrounded by a bunch of equally nude glass figurines that she’d had to move one by bloody one, but the software was taking longer than she’d anticipated to hunt down the pin code. She tried to stay as still as possible as the tablet churned through combinations, discarding some, pushing forward others, but it wasn’t easy.
The house was silent as a grave, except for the beating of her own heart, which seemed so loud Penny thought she was damn lucky Demetrious wasn’t home, or surely he’d hear it, too. But then hadn’t she picked this night for that very reason? Every year without fail Demetrious attended some posh ball for some obscure charity Penny had never heard of. It was a fashionable charity of course. People like Demetrious never seemed to give money to those who really needed—like abandoned foster kids. She’d read, in her research, that people spent thousands on all sorts of nonsense once there, no doubt whilst quaffing champagne and eating quail’s eggs or something of the like.
“Rich people food,” Lyra had said when Penny asked her what the hell a quail’s egg was. They’d eaten pot noodles for dinner that night.
Regardless of what Demetrious was eating, Penny had a good few hours before he returned, and another twenty minutes or so before his ridiculously predictable security people did another sweep. Of course they’d be far less predictable if their boss, Max, was around. But he had the same night off every week and they’d found out in their research that the old adage, when the cat’s away held firm. Still, time was ticking on and already thirty-five minutes had passed since she slipped in the back door.
Come on, she told the tablet. Come the hell on. The progress bar on the bottom of the screen hit the ninety percent mark, meaning the software was down to the last handful of combinations. Another few minutes and it would tell her exactly what code she needed to plug into the safe.
Penny exhaled carefully and unzipped the front pocket of her waist bag. The moment the tablet gave her the software she could…. The progress bar hit one hundred before disappearing to be replaced with a string of numbers. Excitement shot through Penny and she grinned. She carefully unplugged the cable she’d run from the tablet to the now open key pad on the safe, winding it up against the back of the tablet. The pin code was a string of sixteen numbers long and Penny wondered how the hell Demetrious remembered it. No matter.
She keyed the numbers in one by one, careful to make sure she got them exactly right. Her hands were steady, the thin gloves almost unnoticeable. She congratulated herself again for resisting the leather.
Once all the numbers were keyed in the safe gave an audible click before swinging slightly open. Penny pressed the sleep button on her tablet and placed it back into her waist bag, careful to zip it tightly in.
After all our planning, all those years feeling helpless…. Penny opened the safe slowly, almost nervously, and when it was at its widest arc almost gasped. There was far more in there than she’d expected, and this wasn’t the only safe in the house! She’d gone for the smallest one, the one he might not notice empty for a while. Less risk but still plenty of reward. How the rich live, she thought, disgusted all over again that one person could have so much whilst others had so little. Well today she’d change that, readdress the balance ever so slightly, and then Rachel and Lyra could do the same.
Carefully Penny took her torch out of her bag and shone it into the safe, outlining piles of money, papers, and velvet bags that she was sure held jewelry. The light outlined something else as well, two thin laser beams criss-crossing the entrance diagonally. As expected. With one hand tilting the torch she removed her own laser, the special one she’d had to break into Mr. Grope-my-cleaners-Smith’s summer house to afford. Right in the centre point…. She lined it up, popped the torch into her mouth and then pressed its button slowly. Her own beam merged with the other two, scattering them. Quick as a shot, Penny’s arm went into the safe. She grabbed the nearest bundle of cash and turned off her laser. The beams in the safe merged again.