Page 2 of His Untouchable Heart

And I was the one left to clean up the mess.

The job came with complete control, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that meant safety. Too many people had something to lose if the truth came out, and every decision I made was being watched.

Which was why I had to be careful.

Careful with Gabrielle.

Careful with the art and the money.

My fingers inched toward my phone, a habit I needed to break. I should have ignored it—should have focused on the report I was supposed to be drafting for MMWF.

But instead, I flipped the screen over and unlocked it. There it was. The brokerage account. The obscene number stared back at me.

Charlotte’s money.

Or rather, the money she had left behind without ever telling me it existed. I had found out weeks after she was gone when her lawyer contacted me, explaining that my late wife had been sitting on a fortune she never once mentioned.

Why?

I still didn’t have an answer.

The question gnawed at me during quiet moments—between meetings, in the dead of night as I stared at the ceiling—wondering what else she had kept from me besides the fact that she was a billionaire living like an ordinary person.

I hadn’t touched a cent. Not from her trust fund.

But I had considered it.

This morning, after my workout, I had almost placed a call. A luxury car dealership in Brickell. I could afford anything on the lot. A Bentley, an Aston Martin. I could have it delivered to my door by the afternoon. But the thought had barely settled before I shut it down.

The moment people saw me spending money, questions would start. And I wasn’t in the habit of answering questions. I locked my phone, shoving it onto the desk before the thought could tempt me again.

Money wasn’t the problem.

Trust was.

And right now, there was too much in this gallery I didn’t understand.

I pressed my fingers to my temples, forcing the tension from my jaw. I wasn’t a man easily distracted but today was proving otherwise.

I needed to focus.

The ledger sat in Gabrielle’s hands now, and that alone should have been my priority. The book was everything—a detailed account of decades of deception, documenting every piece of stolen art that had passed through the Devereux family’s hands.

Some pieces had been sold to private collectors under forged provenance. Others were still locked in the vault beneath this very building—a vault I now had full access to.

The weight of responsibility settled heavily in my chest.

This wasn’t just about restitution.

It was about power.

For years, institutions had turned a blind eye to what men like Alistair Devereux had done, pretending that it wasn’t tainted just because a painting had changed hands legally.

Now, I was holding the evidence to undo all of that. And the world was watching.

I rose from my chair, moving toward the window. The Miami heat pressed against the glass, a shimmering distortion of the streets below. The city was alive—chaotic and relentless, a far cry from the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I had spent most of my young career. Back when, for me, art was about preservation, not corruption.

I exhaled, my reflection staring back at me in the glass. This was my reality now.

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