Chapter 4 Liquid Assets

Sleep hadn’t come easy.

By dawn, fueled by strong coffee and chili scrambled eggs, Charlie was already an hour deep into research that would have looked deeply alarming to anyone glancing over her shoulder. At the kitchen table, her phone and a notepad spread before her, she mapped out the fine line between wealth and a federal investigation: how much gold a single dealer could move without blinking, what dollar amount triggered a currency transaction report, and why nobody sane tried to sell five hundred bars of gold to one guy behind a counter.

The math was daunting, but the path forward was clear. Small sales she could handle herself, spread across enough private traders to avoid unwanted attention. The larger problem—the sheer, immovable weight of the rest—needed a different kind of solution. It needed someone who could make a mountain of gold look not like a crime, but an inheritance.

That part needed Warren.

She got dressed, pulled twenty-five bars out of the storage space and packed them into a few of Atlas’s large black duffle bags.

***