She nodded against my chest and took a deep breath and just let me hold her for a minute. I could feel her relaxing a little as I rubbed circles on her back and waited for her to begin.

“You have—there is a Leda and the Swan painting in the gallery that looks frighteningly authentic—like a… Michelangelo. It scared the crap out of me when I first spotted it. There are other Italian works in the collection, so it’s not unreasonable to believe Graham was actively collecting Italian pieces from the period. I’ve been afraid to even speak the name Michelangelo out loud, and you have to understand it could have been collected at any time, and unless I can find some purchase documentation or written records of such an acquisition in Imogene’s diaries, I won’t be able to tell you if it was done by him. Michelangelo is way above my expertise and knowledge, on a good day. What I do know is that many artists painted Leda and the Swan, but a large portion of the Leda paintings were destroyed later by puritanicals who saw them as obscene. Well, some of them are, quite frankly. A woman being fucked by a swan and not all of them show mere suggestions of the sex. Some are very graphic, like really filthy five-hundred-year-old bestiality porn. Michelangelo is known to have painted a Leda, but it’s never turned up anywhere and believed to have been destroyed sometime in the eighteenth century. So, if your Leda is an authentic Michelangelo, not only is it valuable for being his work, but valuable by attrition because it survived the calculated destruction of all Leda paintings over the centuries. Your value is in the high hundreds of millions by my best guess. If you have Michelangelo’s Leda, then you have a billion plus pounds of art on your hands. There’s no knowing how high those paintings will go on the auction block.”

I rubbed up and down her back and soaked it all in. It was far more than I’d believed the collection to be worth before she came here, but then that couldn’t be such a surprise. I’d been in denial, putting off dealing with the art for the last four years. I’d needed Gabrielle for a very long time before she ever got here. “Thank you for telling me, kitten. I know it’s a huge responsibility dropped onto your shoulders, but you’re going to do magnificently, and we’ll just take it one step at a time, cliché or not, until we know what the best course of action is.”

“I understand why you needed the NDA from me. Nobody can know this art is here, Ivan. It’s far too valuable for disclosing its existence until it can be moved, or the security way upgraded. After the drone incident I think you need to be worried. I’m worried and I just work here.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at her last comment. “You’re far more than someone who just works here, Gabrielle. I hope you understand me well on that point.”