“You burned down our home,” Leo said beside me, and I couldn’t tell if he was horrified or impressed.
“Our home is wherever we are,” I said, my voice hoarse from smoke. “The suite is just a room.”
Orion appeared on my other side, his face streaked with soot, his eyes fierce. “You are a brilliant, reckless, terrifying woman. You weaponized fire safety.”
“You did say I was going to burn the place down.”
Ares dropped down beside us, accepting an oxygen mask from a paramedic. “You were right.”
“I’m always right,” I said, then started coughing. The paramedic pushed the oxygen mask over my face with a stern look.
“She deliberately set a fire,” the paramedic said to Orion. “In an enclosed space. With people in it. Who does that?”
“Someone who was about to die anyway,” I managed between breaths. “Better to burn and call for help than suffocate in silence.”
“Ms. George saved all our lives,” Orion told the paramedic. “That man”—he pointed at Marcus getting hauled into the police car—“planted explosives. She triggered the fire alarm to bring help.”
The paramedic looked at the burning penthouse, Marcus in handcuffs, and the four of us covered in soot, water, and blood. “You people are insane,” he said.
“Probably,” Leo agreed cheerfully. “But we’re alive.”
An hour later, after the fire was extinguished, Marta found us; the police had taken our statements, and the media had captured footage of us wrapped in blankets like disaster survivors.
“You’re on the news,” she reported. “All the networks. ‘Billionaires Survive Assassination Attempt.’ TMZ is calling it the ‘Casino Fire Conspiracy.’ Someone got footage of the explosion in the construction lot.”
“Of course they did,” I said. “This is Vegas.”
“The narrative’s already shifting,” Marta continued, pulling up her phone. “Social media’s going crazy. #TeamTashi is trending again, but now it’s #FirefighterTashi. Someone made fan art of you throwing the candelabra. You’re a meme.”
“I’m a what?”
She showed me her screen. Sure enough, there I was—an artistic interpretation of me—hurling the candelabra at thecurtains, while Marcus cowered in the background. The caption read:When you’re done being the victim.
Despite everything—the smoke still in my lungs, the adrenaline still coursing through my veins, the sheer terror of the last hour—I started laughing.
“She’s in shock,” Ares told the paramedic.
“I’m not in shock,” I protested. “I’m just—we almost died. Again. And I’m a meme. Again. This is my life now.”
“Our life,” Orion corrected, pulling me close despite the paramedic’s protests. “We almost died together. We survived together. We’re going to rebuild together.”
“The suite?—”
“Is insured,” Leo said. “And honestly? It needed remodeling anyway. I’m thinking fire-resistant curtains this time. Maybe we skip the vintage fabrics.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.
A police detective approached with her notebook. “Ms. George? We’ll need you to walk us through exactly what happened up there. Why did you set the fire?”
I told her. About Marcus’s confession. The timer. The incendiary charges. The fire alarm was the only system that he couldn’t completely disable. I would prefer to call for help and risk burning rather than suffocate in silence.
She wrote it all down, her expression carefully neutral.
“That was either the bravest or stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said finally.
“Why not both?” I offered.
She almost smiled. “Mr. Talbor—or whatever his real name is—is in custody. We found the explosive devices. His false identity. Evidence of the conspiracy. We have enough evidence, combined with today’s Gaming Commission hearing and the federal investigation into Henri Saltz, to put everyone involved away for a very long time.”
