“Look at the comments,” Leo said. “People are calling us heroes. She made us look like the good guys.”
“We are the good guys,” Orion said.
“Yeah, but now people believe it.” Leo scrolled. “There’s fan art. Of us. When’s the last time that happened to billionaires?”
Orion’s mouth twitched. “Never.”
“She’s done what we hired her for,” I said. “She’s bold. Takes risks we won’t.”
Orion stared at the screen. “Where is she?”
“Sleeping,” Leo said. “Up all night creating this.”
“You know this because?”
Leo shifted. Childhood tell. “I texted her after I saw the posts.”
“At two in the morning.”
“Yeah.”
Cornered, predictably, Orion shifted tack. “Safety meeting at seven. Henri insisted. He’s pissed about the fire.”
“Henri’s always pissed,” Leo muttered.
True. Our CFO had been with us for seventeen years—since we bought the property with his money after our parents died. Henri Saltz had gambled at our tiny casino. He was the finance guy who told us he made it big on Wall Street. He invested in our small dream and made it huge. But he had opinions about everything. Risk assessments for every decision. Skepticism about every innovation. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him smile.
And I didn’t trust him.
I didn’t trust him at a gut level, the way I would trust someone with whom I’d shared dangerous experiences. Henri made decisions from spreadsheets, not from standing in burning buildings deciding who to save first.
“He’ll hate the social campaign,” I said.
“He hates everything fun,” Leo agreed.
I went back to the footage. My eyes tracked movement patterns, time stamps, and access points. What I had discovered was chilling. Someone had deliberately created a fire hazard in her room and had accessed her suite with a key card or by bypassing the lock.
That took skill. Resources. Insider knowledge.
I’d pulled footage from the executive floor for forty-eight hours before the fire and found the damning evidence that proved the sabotage by inference. All the access logs had been wiped. We had a mole inside the Olympus Royale.
Someone wanted Tashi gone. Dead, ideally.
Why her?
Tashi had been in Las Vegas barely three days—long enough to sit through executive meetings and learn names, not nearly long enough to make friends or enemies. Unless it wasn’t about her. Unless it was about us. Sending a message to the Kolykos brothers through our most vulnerable target.
That made my jaw clench. Made my hands want to form fists.
At 6:58 a.m., Henri Saltz, already scowling, fifty-three years old with groomed silver hair and wearing a suit typical of East Coast wealth, swept in.
Henri fought us on every modernization—credit card payment at slots, digital marketing, and social media use. Always the same argument: “This is how we’ve always done it.”
Except our revenue had declined since the money-laundering scandal, and we needed a kick start to regain our customers. And Tashi had just shown that we needed her.
“Gentlemen,” he said, taking his seat opposite Orion. “Shall we discuss how your employee nearly burned down a floor her first week?”
“Morning, Henri,” Leo said.
