Sadly, I don't own Lara Croft. Still, the franchise has great potential since I like writing crime stories. Enjoy. And please let me know what you think.


Lara Croft: Thrill of Robbery.

She had never expected herself capable of doing this, but she had no choice. In any case, it was exciting as well as terrifying.

When she had first begun doing this just to keep herself going, Lara had been hesitant as if she felt as if she were taking a wrecking ball to her soul.

Here she was, heiress to the Croft family legacy and she was reduced to committing robberies and burglaries in London just to support herself. Her courier job was crap. The pay was awful and barely enough for her to support herself. What made it ironic was she was the heiress to a rich family, she had a massive mansion, she had everything most people in her position would die for.

But she couldn't.

Her house had not felt like home ever since her father had vanished off the face of the Earth. And once he was gone, she had found it hard to stay in her home, and so she had left.

She hadn't bothered with college or higher education.

What would be the point? Yes, she might not be in this mess, but she wouldn't have anyone to share her life with. She'd had a few boyfriends, but some of them were pigs. And her dad. Where the hell was he? Lara had no idea, she had just left her home when her original investigations had gotten her nowhere.

Instead of anything spectacular, Lara was nothing more than a courier. It was okay work, she guessed. The pay was crap, but she was always on the move. She sometimes raced her mates and had fun and she went to parties. But the fact of the matter was she had to face reality and she knew the flat she shared with three others in order to make the rent work out just caused more trouble than it was worth. While the jobs were regular especially nowadays, she worked and lived with others in a competitive job. But like her, they didn't get as much on a regular basis.

It wasn't until the last few months money was scarce, and bills were mounting up and up, forcing Lara to begin becoming a burglar. She was inspired by a story in a newspaper, and while it was not really something she had ever imagined - hell, she had even tried to put it off for a spell, Lara had been drawn to the idea of becoming a burglar.

By stealing money, she could ensure she and her friends remained afloat. But the big problem was obviously making sure nobody became suspicious of where the inflow of money was coming from. What if her friends asked too many questions? What if she made the mistake of getting too greedy and too spendy happy, and someone found out? What if she made some stupid mistake, like accidentally cutting herself and leaving a spot of blood behind which would make it easy for the police to find her?

Those questions had been one of the primary reasons she had hesitated. Another was the idea she would be disappointing her father. Growing up, Lara had been a daddy's girl, but since he was the only parent and family in her life, it wasn't hard to understand why. She knew he would be disappointed, and that daddy's girl had not died out, not once over the years. And believe me, Lara had tried on so many occasions to exorcise it; her dad was gone, he was not coming back.

But in the end, she had gone through with it. And she had succeeded. It had taken Lara three weeks of watching and spying on her target, three long weeks of looking for routes to get there, escape routes if anything went wrong. She had gone in the early morning, knowing her victim went jogging every morning. The fact he lived by himself was a bonus. Since he lived by himself it meant there was no chance of anyone stumbling across her. He'd been married once, but it fell apart for some reason Lara genuinely could not care about. He had kept the jewellery he had given his wife, and the fact he did that alone was telling but it only made her a few hundred quid richer.

But burglary only got her so far.

She turned to robbery.

It wasn't a particularly easy decision. The difference between burglary and robbery was quite wide. With burglary, you broke into a place which was unoccupied, and you hightailed it whenever you heard so much as a creak. But with robbery… that was different. More violent. And truthfully it had appealed more to Lara, who was more action-orientated and she had never, ever run away from a fight.

The difference with robbery was you forced your way somehow into a house, violently wrenching money and whatever you could sell while holding terrified homeowners close by.

Robbery was not what she had imagined herself doing, but truthfully she hadn't imagined or pictured herself forcing her way through a house's doors and windows and committing burglary either. How life turned out, eh? But she had become sick and tired of how the burglaries were going; she'd nearly been caught a few times, and it had nearly been the end of everything.

Lara usually tried to commit her burglaries once or twice a week so she didn't make some kind of stupid mistake that would get her arrested. But also so she could mix the cash up with the regular rent so it wouldn't be found while keeping the rest for a rainy day. Unfortunately, she had lost her job because there had been cutbacks, and when she had tried to look for new people to burgle, people had been getting smarter so her chances of committing a few burglaries were not especially high.

Desperate, Lara had gone down other avenues in the maze.

Pickpocketing was out, although the principles were sound enough. The only tricky part was doing it in an age where CCTV worked. Bank robbery? No, it involved a huge amount of planning and she did not have the means to break into a place with high security. She would also need to bring in other people to carry out separate tasks, and if that happened one or two things would happen; one, they might spend too much of their share, resulting in the arrest for the entire group, second, they might be caught because of some stupid mistake.

Holding her guns as if to reassure herself, Lara walked towards the jewellery shop. It was in a relatively quiet part of the city, which was one of the reasons she had chosen it. Another was it was close to Regent's Park, meaning she could easily just slip out of the place without being seen and join the crowd, or she could do a runner and find a place where she could just find another way out.

But while Lara was, at heart, an action woman who threw herself into a fray, she had quickly worked out she would need to be incredibly careful about committing her burglaries. As she committed more burglaries, Lara began realising the returns for her work weren't enough. What made it worse was she didn't like skulking around for hours looking for ways of escape or reaching the targets in case she was seen, and she didn't like spending hours trying to learn and work out the routines of the people she was robbing from.

Worse, she was beginning to grow bored. The homeowners were being actively encouraged by the police when she had begun increasing the number of burglaries she carried out while making sure her precautions so the police didn't work out she was the one behind them to take their own precautions against burglary. Locksmiths were making a small fortune in getting their services demanded, new locks to prevent bump keys were installed and deadbolts were added to the security of the doors. Alarms were being fitted to premises up and down London. And all because of her, because she was carrying out a burglary once every week. If the situation wasn't so desperate, Lara imagined she would be laughing her head off. But she wasn't.

Ironically, the discovery her father was alive and on the quest to prevent an ancient Japanese queen from ever being excavated by a shadowy organisation conspiracy theorists would give their mothers just to theorise and learn about, gave her what she wanted the most. It had been after Lara had managed to get hold of another courier job while ignoring her past as steadfastly as she could. Her father had been disappointed she hadn't gone to college and had instead just sat back and let life come to her, but Lara had actually grown to like it even if her decisions did make her yearn for something better.

It wasn't until she moved back into the manor and tried to turn her back on the revelations she'd discovered and her courier job as well as her life of crime that Lara realised such things were easier said than done. While her courier job had been tedious and it might have been liberating because she wasn't stuck in some grotty little office, having to deal with the tedium of the day-to-day aggro involved, her life as a burglar had truly made her feel incredibly free. The only other time she had felt this good was when she was on that damned island.

Lara had tried to throw that life away in the hopes of becoming a Tomb Raider. Why would she want to continue with her life as a criminal? She would soon have a better income, and now she had embraced her past instead of running away like a coward, burglary was no longer necessary for putting food on the table and clothes on her back. She thought she could live without it. But she was wrong. She had tasted the adventure burglary and crime offered to her and she discovered, in short, she couldn't. She had loved the adventure of committing crimes, and although the sheep were growing fangs that did not stop her.

But now things had changed. Ever since she had been on that island, Lara had been hardened by the experience. She had been hunted down like an animal, forced to adapt and she had dredged up her skills as an athlete and an archer and fought them back. She had killed Vogel, and a handful of goons he'd had on hand to guard the unfortunate sailors and god alone knew who else to excavate the tomb. She had crossed boundaries.

Burglary was now out for Lara Croft.

While she was certain she could still pull them, the idea of breaking into a place that was empty was no longer attractive for her. Lara had acquired two handguns for her work as a tomb raider, but when she joined a gun club in order to better learn how to use a weapon, she acquired two more for her 'job' as a robber.

Her first burglaries had been houses. Now her targets were jewellery shops. She always tried to go in the dead of night, she would either spray them with some kind of sleeping agent or she would threaten the staff with her guns. She always tried never to shoot them. She wasn't bothered about shooting a cultist or someone trying to harm her, but she drew the line when she threatened anyone with her weapons.

It was the only scruple she had left.