Page 93 of Don’t Go Stealing My Heart

She dropped her knife in a rush, relieved she wouldn’t have to kill Yevgen herself. Lucien would always protect her. He’d always protected her. Gratitude made her dizzy, or maybe it was the adrenaline crash. She turned to hug the man who’d raised her like the daughter he’d never had and blinked in confusion. It almost looked like his gun was aimed at her.

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Clementine took a step away, then remembered Yevgen at her back and stopped.

“What’s going on, Lucien?” She laughed nervously, unable to reset her brain from attack mode to unthreatened. Lucien was the last person who’d hurt her. He was here to help.

He tipped his chin to Yevgen. “Take down the record. Wrap it carefully and meet me at the extraction point.”

“And miss all this fun?”

Lucien ran his tongue over his teeth, a move he did when impatient. “You’ve had enough fun. Get on with it.”

Lead settled in her stomach. They were talking like a team, and Lucien was dressed in black heist clothes. Because he’s here to save me, her mind protested.

Yevgen lingered, something unspoken passing between them, and Clementine’s wishful thinking plummeted. There was no animosity between them. They were implementing a plan, one she’d asked Lucien to avoid. She may not have mentioned the gold record, but she’d asked him to leave Jack’s family in peace, and here he was, robbing them with the man who’d stabbed her.

She rounded on Lucien. “I know my leaving left you in the lurch and training someone from scratch is rough, but Yevgen is a loose cannon, and you know it. He’s a fucking lunatic.”

Yevgen chuckled. “That’s no way to speak of your kin.”

She snarled at the bastard. “Working in the same circles doesn’t make us kin.”

He waggled his dark eyebrows, his smugness unsettling. She’d seen him boastful and predatory, hostile and off-kilter. She’d never seen him like this, giddy with delight.

“No, it doesn’t,” he said, his accent thickening as he spoke. “Personality wise, we are nothing alike. If I were as naïve as you, I’d kill myself. But we are kin, Clementine. We were raised by the same man.”

Ridiculous. Yevgen must be toying with her. Clementine and Lucien had lived together on their own. He’d leave for days at a time, busy with his research and fencing stolen goods, visiting charities and orphanages overseas. He would set her up at home with food and money, call her every day. Yevgen may be ten years older than her, but she’d have known if Lucien had raised another surrogate child.

She faced Lucien, expecting annoyance on his face—irritation with his new partner for trying to get under her skin. Instead she saw pity. “Bag the record,” he told Yevgen. “I’ll meet you shortly.”

Lucien hadn’t contradicted him. Not so much as an eye roll at the idiocy of Yevgen’s claim. Numbness tingled through her limbs.

“Sure thing, boss.” Yevgen sneered at Clementine and disappeared into the sound room, doing Lucien’s bidding like it was the most natural thing in the world.

She curled her toes, didn’t know why she couldn’t feel her feet. “He’s lying, right?”

He had to be lying. Lucien raising Yevgen made as much sense as Clementine walking on water.

Lucien’s gun stayed on her, but his eyes crinkled with a fondness she used to love. “My darling, Yuzu, you were always so easy to sway.”

The numbness spread to her chest. “It can’t be true.”

“But it is.”

He didn’t hesitate. Not so much as a pause, and blood flow returned to her veins, growing hotter by the second. “He’s worked in competition with us for years, even sabotaging our heists, getting there first. He stabbed me, Lucien! Jammed a knife into my stomach. If you raised us both, how could you forgive him for that?”

“Nothing to forgive when it was done under my orders.”

She stumbled back and braced herself against the hallway wall.

A flicker of madness flared in his eyes. “You needed the competition, sweetheart. The push to succeed. And you were always better than him, which he knew. So when you started second-guessing our work, threatening to quit, I had him up the stakes.”

“You had me stabbed?”

“It was a wounding blow, easily healed.”

“No. No. No.” This couldn’t be happening. “You cried that day, sat with me every night. You said you’d support me if I quit.” Like he had this time, but her voice shrunk as she spoke, her world spinning off its axis.