Chapter 18: Deciding What To Do With The Treasure
Half an hour in, I closed the tab and rubbed my eyes.
Yeah. I was screwed.
Pawn shops would low-ball
and ask questions. Reputable dealers would absolutely ask questions, and they’d want docuntation, and they’d report transactions over a certain amount to the governnt, and the governnt had a lot of opinions about people walking in with kilo bars of unsourced gold.
The bars themselves had serial numbers. Of course they did. Pre-collapse Velham had a functioning banking system, and pre-collapse banks weren’t stupid.
Every bar I had was probably traceable, on a hundred and fifty year old ledger that didn’t exist in this tiline... but the numbers did. Modern dealers cross-referenced against international databases.
If my bars matched nothing in any database, that was suspicious. If they matched sothing, that was worse. Either way, red flag.
The jewellery was worse because so of it was identifiable. The tiara especially. I wasn’t selling a museum-grade tiara at a pawn shop. I’d be in handcuffs by sunset.
lting things down was an option. But lting gold into anonymous lumps required a setup I didn’t have, and learning to do it myself ant buying suspicious equipnt that ca with its own paper trail.
Black market sales were possible. But I had no contacts, no way to vet a buyer, and walking into the wrong eting with a backpack full of gold was a great way to end up dead in a parking lot.
I leaned back in my creaky chair and stared at the ceiling.
’I’m a newbie. I’m a complete, blank-slate, day-one newbie at this, and I’m sitting on enough wealth to retire three generations of my family.’
I needed help.
Specifically, I needed soone who already knew how this worked. Who had moved things before. Who wouldn’t ask the kind of questions that would end in a police report.
My brain offered up the answer instantly. I had been ignoring it for the last hour.
Aunt Mira.
She wasn’t really my aunt, but my mom’s friend from before I was born, and I’d called her aunty since I could talk because that’s what kids did. Stupid kids.
She’d shown up at birthdays. She’d mailed
money in envelopes during college without telling my mom. She’d always been... around. In a quiet, persistent way that nobody else in my life had managed.
And when I was twelve, I’d accidentally walked in on a phone call of hers I really, really shouldn’t have. The things she said and the tone she used. The nas she dropped, none of which I’d recognised at the ti but a few of which I’d later seen in news articles.
She’d known, the second she’d seen my face in the doorway. She had ended the call and sat
down and explained, in the gentlest voice I’d ever heard from her, that so adults had jobs that had to be kept very, very quiet. And that if I could keep her secret, she’d never lie to
again about anything else, ever.
I’d kept the secret. I was twelve and terrified and a little impressed. Which kid didn’t want a cool, secretive aunt?
She had been trying to get past my walls ever since. Every birthday card, every random check-in, every Lukas, are you eating, do you need anything, I’m right here. She had been knocking on a door I never opened.
And I never opened it because I was paranoid and broken and convinced that anyone who wanted to be close to
had to want sothing. Even her. Especially her, sotis, because she was the one who tried hardest, and my brain had decided that the people who tried hardest were the ones with the biggest hidden agenda.
I rubbed my face.
’God. She just wanted to be my aunt.’
I’d told Zero I was done with the paranoia thing. That I was trying the other thing.
Couldn’t very well do that for one person and not the other.
I picked up my phone before I could talk myself out of it and scrolled to her contact. Aunt Mira ??. She’d put the heart in herself, years ago, when she’d grabbed my phone at a family dinner. I’d never taken it out.
I pressed call.
She picked up on the second ring. Of course she did.
"Lukas?" Her voice was instantly alert, a little tight, the way you sound when soone you’ve been worried about for years finally calls you. "Honey, are you okay? Did sothing happen?"
"Hi, Aunty. I’m okay. Nothing’s wrong." I replied, trying to keep my voice steady.
She paused, probably reading
through the phone. She was really good at that, I rembered.
"...You don’t call
to chat, sweetheart. Talk to ."
I took a breath.
"I owe you an apology first. A big one. I’ve been a bad nephew for a long ti and I know it, and I’m sorry. I had reasons, but they weren’t good enough, and you didn’t deserve them."
The line went very quiet.
"...Lukas."
"I’m not saying it because I want sothing. I an, I do want sothing. But I would’ve said this part anyway. I just hadn’t gotten around to it."
"Honey, you don’t have to—"
I cut her off, "I do. I really do. And I want to see you. Today, if you can. I need your help with sothing, and I need it to be you, because I don’t trust anyone else with it."
I heard her breath catch, like soone who’d been waiting a very long ti for a sentence to land.
"I’ll co pick you up," she said imdiately. "Where are you? Still the apartnt?"
"Still the apartnt."
"Two hours. Don’t move and don’t eat anything, I’m taking you to lunch. Wear sothing that isn’t a hoodie, Lukas, I swear to god."
"I have like one shirt with a collar—"
"Then wear the collar shirt. Two hours."
She hung up before I could answer.
I sat there with the phone in my hand and a coffee going cold beside , feeling sothing I hadn’t felt in a very long ti. Sothing a little terrifying and a little warm. Like a door I’d kept shut for years had just had its hinges tested, and they still worked.
Honestly, I was terrified inside. Sothing scread at
that I was doing it wrong and that I would regret trusting people. I might, I really might regret all of this.
’But I’ll regret it more if I chose to back out.’
I went to find the collar shirt.
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