My chest tightened. “Because of me.”
“Because of whoever’s orchestrating this,” Ares corrected. “Marcus was a pawn. Henri’s involved but probably not the mastermind. Someone’s funding this operation, coordinating the attacks, and timing everything for maximum damage.”
“Who?”
“Neville pulled usable data from the flash drive,” Ares said. “Enough to confirm this is coordinated—but not enough yet to name the person pulling the strings.”
Leo handed me a container of pad thai—my favorite, somehow he’d remembered. “But in the meantime, we need to talk. About us. About what happens next.”
I picked at the noodles, not really hungry. “What is there to talk about? I’m radioactive. Being associated with me isdestroying your business. The smart move is for me to resign, disappear, let you salvage what’s left.”
“No,” all three of them said simultaneously.
“Tashi.” Orion leaned forward. “We made a decision three days ago. All of us. To try something that society says is impossible. And yes, it’s messy. Yes, there are consequences. But we don’t abandon people we love just because things get hard.”
They’d barely let me out of their sight since the fire. Every meal appeared without me asking. Every door opened before I reached it. Every night, one of them checked that I was breathing before I slept.
Three days wasn’t long—but it was long enough to feel what it meant to be chosen.
“Love.” The word caught in my throat. “You barely know me.”
“We know enough,” Ares said. “We know you’re brilliant at your job. We know you fight for what you believe in. We know you tried to tell each of us the truth about the others and kept getting interrupted. We know you’re not a predator or a gold digger or any of the other things people are calling you.”
“We also know,” Leo added, “that you’re sitting here alone, reading terrible things about yourself, trying to figure out how to sacrifice yourself to save us. Which means you care about us too.”
Did I? Was that what this hollowness meant—that I cared about people who were being hurt because of their association with me?
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted. “Any of this. The relationship part. The public scandal part. The being investigated by the Gaming Commission part. I’m out of my depth.”
“So are we,” Orion said. “None of us have been in a polyamorous relationship before. None of us have dealt with this level of coordinated attack. We’re all figuring it out as we go.”
“But we’re figuring it out together,” Leo emphasized. “From now on. Not separately. Not with you isolated in this suite while we handle everything. Together.”
I wanted to believe them. Wanted to believe that love—if that was what this was—could survive public scrutiny and professional consequences and the weight of everyone’s judgment.
But I’d watched relationships crumble under much less pressure.
“Henri knows everything,” I said quietly. “If he’s been monitoring surveillance for months, he has footage of…us. All of us. In compromising situations.”
“Probably,” Ares admitted. “But that footage was obtained illegally through unauthorized surveillance. It’s not admissible in court or regulatory proceedings.”
“It doesn’t need to be admissible to destroy you,” I said. “It just needs to exist. One leak to the media, one anonymous upload, and your reputations are done.”
The silence that followed confirmed they’d already thought of this.
“So, what do we do?” I asked. “Wait for Henri to detonate whatever bomb he’s built? Hope that people believe us over salacious evidence? Pray that the Gaming Commission finds in our favor despite everything?”
“We go on offense,” Orion said. “We stop reacting to attacks and start controlling the narrative. We find out who’s funding this operation and why. We expose Henri’s embezzlement and money laundering. We prove Marcus’s allegations are false. And we—” He met my eyes. “We tell our story. On our terms. Before someone else tells it for us.”
“Our story,” I repeated. “You mean admitting publicly that I’m involved with all three of you?”
“If it comes to that, yes.” Leo’s voice was steady. “We’re not ashamed of what we have. We’re not going to hide it or pretend it’s something dirty. If people can’t handle the truth, that’s their problem.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re billionaires with resources and lawyers,” I said. “I’m just a marketing director who’s about to be unemployable.”
“You’re not just anything,” Ares said firmly. “You’re the woman who saved this hotel’s reputation with a single marketing campaign. You’re the person who saw potential where everyone else saw liability. You’re someone we—” He stopped, recalibrating. “Someone we want in our lives, scandal or not.”
I looked at each of them—these complicated, brilliant, infuriating men who’d somehow become essential in less than two weeks.
