The vault door slams shut with a sound like a coffin closing, and I realize I'm about to spend three days trapped with the most infuriating man I've ever met. "Well," Declan Hayes says, leaning against the reinforced steel wall of the panic room with that insufferable smirk still plastered on his face, "this is cozy." I want to strangle him. With my bare hands. Slowly. "This is your fault," I hiss, dropping my laptop bag onto the single metal cot that's apparently all the universe thinks we need. "I told you the secondary alarm would trigger if you deviated from my sequence by even half a second." "And I told you that your precious sequence didn't account for the building manager's girlfriend deciding to drop by for a surprise visit." He runs a hand through his dark hair, somehow looking like a cologne model even in crisis. "I had to improvise." "You don't improvise with a Kensington-class security system!" My voice echoes off the concrete walls of our eight-by-ten prison. "You follow the plan exactly, or you end up—" I gesture wildly around us, "—locked in a panic room for seventy-two hours waiting for the automated release!" Declan pushes off the wall and prowls closer. Even in the harsh LED lighting, his eyes are an unsettling shade of green that seems to see right through my carefully constructed defenses. "You know what your problem is, Nora? You can't handle anything that doesn't fit into one of your neat little algorithms." "My 'neat little algorithms' have kept you out of prison for two years," I snap back. "Maybe show some gratitude." "Gratitude?" He laughs, but there's no humor in it. "You mean the twenty percent cut you take from every job? Yeah, you're a real philanthropist." I turn away from him before I do something stupid, like let him see how much his words sting. He's right, of course. I'm no better than he is—a con artist who happens to work with code instead of charm. We're both thieves. The only difference is that I'm honest about being dishonest. The panic room is exactly what it sounds like: a reinforced concrete box designed to protect corporate executives during emergencies. There's the cot, a small chemical toilet behind a privacy screen, and enough emergency rations to keep two people alive for a week. There's also about a thousand dollars worth of networking equipment stacked in cases along one wall—the very equipment we were supposed to steal before Declan's "improvisation" triggered the lockdown. "Fine," I say, grabbing the equipment cases and starting to drag them across the floor. "Here's how this is going to work. This is my side." I create a wall of cases down the middle of the room. "That's your side. You stay on your side, I stay on mine, and maybe we both survive this without committing homicide." Declan watches me with amusement dancing in those irritating eyes. "And the cot?" "Mine. You get the floor." "I literally saved your life tonight." "You literally endangered my life tonight by deviating from the plan!" He holds up his hands in surrender, but he's still smirking. "Whatever helps you sleep, princess." I hate that nickname. Hate the way it sounds in his whiskey-smooth voice. Hate how it makes something flutter in my chest that has no business fluttering. "Seventy-two hours," I mutter, pulling my laptop out and trying to focus on anything other than the fact that I'm trapped in a concrete box with Declan Hayes. "I can survive anything for seventy-two hours." From his side of my makeshift barrier, I hear him chuckle. "We'll see about that." ---