Chapter 27 Tashi
Tashi
The employee elevator doors slid open the moment Orion and I reached them. Ares looked like a man walking away from a battlefield. His face was tight, pale under the bruises, eyes focused in that distant, calculating way he got when something had gone very, very wrong.
“Inside,” he said, voice low but urgent. “Now. Both of you.”
Leo and Neville were already in the elevator, waiting. Orion’s hand found the small of my back—steady, protective—and we stepped inside just as Ares hit the button for the roof access level.
The elevator lurched upward.
No explanation. No breath. Just that sharp, electric tension that said the situation had changed in a way none of us were prepared for.
Ares stood in the corner, his weight braced against the rail as if he was too keyed up to sit still. Orion watched him with a tightening jaw, and Leo glanced between them, quietly assessing.
I finally broke the silence. “Ares, what did you find?”
He didn’t look at me. Not yet. His voice was flat. “Confirmation.”
The elevator dinged.
The roof access corridor was cold and metallic, the air smelling faintly of jet fuel and hot engine oil drifting in from the helipad outside. Ares moved ahead of us, limping but purposeful, and pushed open the service door that led to the mechanical deck.
“Come on,” he said. “You need to see this.”
We followed him across the roof, the wind tugging at my hair and whipping at my clothes.
The sky was still pale, morning blue, but down below, late sleepers or early risers walked the Strip lazily.
It felt surreal being up here with them, like the five of us were perched on top of a secret no one else in Las Vegas could even imagine.
Ares stopped beside a squat metal housing on the west corner of the mechanical deck—a ventilation exhaust unit roughly chest-high, secured with a half-latched maintenance grate.
He pointed to it. “Here.”
Neville knelt immediately and flicked his flashlight inside. The beam illuminated a long, vertical shaft descending deep into the building.
Ares’s expression hardened. “I’ve seen this before.”
Leo folded his arms. “Where?”
“Kandahar.” The word came out like something scraped from broken stone.
“Insurgents used rooftop vent shafts as insertion points. They’d lower explosives on a line into lobbies, ballrooms—anywhere civilians gathered.
There were no visible bombs within the actual room.
No physical devices in ducts. They kept everything above the ceiling grid. ”
A shiver ran down my back. It wasn’t just from the surprisingly chilly breeze.
Ares continued, “I recognized the configuration on the old schematic. Then Neville and I checked the hatch. Last night, between three and three twenty a.m., the hatch logged open. Not logged closed.”
Neville nodded grimly. “That’s the entrance point, opened electronically for quick insertion later.”
Orion crouched next to the vent, peering down the shaft. “So that’s why the ordnance team found nothing. There’s no bomb yet.”
My stomach dropped.
Ares nodded once. “Exactly.”
Orion stood, turning to us. “Now the helicopter exfil Marcus and the other guy talked about fits. He’s planning to come in on the helipad, drop a device down this shaft—directly into the ballroom’s primary load support—and then fly out before anyone knows he was here.”
“He’s going to show up when?” I asked.
Orion’s jaw clenched. “Anytime. He doesn’t need cover of night. He just needs noise. Chaos. Movement.”
Leo’s face went slightly ashen. “We have several guests arriving by helicopter tonight for the gala.”
“Great,” Orion said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “So now we get to check our guests as they arrive, look for a bomber among high rollers and CEOs, and pretend everything is perfectly normal while we wait for Marcus to show up. Fantastic optics.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Neville said quietly. “This guy is good. He can sneak in with the commotion of VIP arrivals. All he needs is thirty seconds of distraction.”
Ares finished showing us the vent, the shaft, and the route the ductwork took past the ballroom. When he stepped away, the cold desert air felt thinner, sharper—like the roof itself had become a pressure chamber.
Orion turned to Ares. “We need a plan for what we do when he actually gets here.”
Ares exhaled slowly in a controlled inhale-exhale that told me he was already calculating, already building a strategy in his mind, already stepping into the space where fear had to take a back seat to leadership.
His voice was low, steady, and dangerous. “He’s coming. And we’re going to stop him.”
He backed away from the vent housing, exchanging a look with Neville—one of those silent, heavy, tactical conversations only men who’ve survived things together can have without speaking.
“We’ll need to adjust for timing,” Neville murmured, scrolling through his tablet. “And guest traffic patterns. That many arrivals gives him too much noise to hide in.”
I pressed my lips together. This sounded much too risky.
Ares must have seen my expression, and he motioned for Neville to follow him.
They moved a few feet away, heads bowed over the schematic Ares had pulled up again, speaking in low, clipped tones.
Leo drifted after them, listening, asking the occasional question.
I stayed where I was, the cold wind tugging at my hair, staring at the shaft that led straight into the heart of the ballroom where I had planned the biggest, boldest declaration of my life.
A bomb. Dropped from the sky. Into the middle of everything.
My chest tightened. “Maybe we should call off the gala.”
No one listened, and I raised my voice.
“We should call off the Gala,” I said, almost shouting into the rooftop wind.
All three men turned immediately.
“No,” Orion said—too fast, too certain.
I swallowed. “But—your hotel, the guests, you—” I shook my head, trying to make the words line up with the very real fear squeezing behind my ribs. “All of you are at risk. I can’t bear the idea of—”
“Tashi.” Orion stepped closer, his eyes locked on mine. “If we call off the gala, they win.”
“That’s not as important as your lives.”
“It is,” he said gently. “They’ve spent months trying to undermine us. Every crisis they created was designed to make us shut down, retreat, and look weak. Tonight, we do the opposite.”
Ares and Neville joined us again. Neville slipped his tablet under his arm. “I’ll take care of those details,” he said quietly to Ares. “I know what to adjust.”
Ares nodded. “I’ll check back with you later.”
With that, Neville headed toward the stairwell door, already typing.
Ares waited until the metal door clanged shut, then turned to Leo and Orion. “We need her downstairs. Too many eyes up here.”
Leo touched my lower back, steering me gently toward the elevator. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get inside.”
I didn’t argue. I was too busy hearing the wind echo against the metal vent, imagining the thin line between what we were planning and what could still go catastrophically wrong.
The elevator doors closed around us, sealing off the rooftop, the vent, and the chilly air conditioning.
Orion pressed the button for our floor and exhaled, tension bleeding off him only slightly.
“This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to back us into a corner,” he said, not exactly to me, not exactly to his brothers—almost as if saying it out loud made it more real. “And it won’t be the last.”
Ares braced himself with one arm along the rail, keeping weight off his injuries. Leo watched him with a quiet, tight concern he didn’t try to hide.
When the elevator reached the executive level, they didn’t take me to their offices.
They took me home.
Or what had quietly become home.
My suite.
As soon as we stepped inside, Orion locked the deadbolt and Leo pulled the privacy latch. Ares checked the corners out of habit.
Only when all three seemed satisfied did they turn toward me—three sets of eyes, three different shades of worry, intensity, and fierce protectiveness.
“You won’t be alone today,” Ares said.
“And while we work,” Orion added, “you stay here. No wandering. No detours. Someone will always be with you.”
Leo sank onto the edge of the bed and patted the spot between his knees, voice softer. “Come here.”
And for the first time since we’d stepped onto that rooftop, I let myself breathe.
The men formed a protective wall around me, Orion kissing my hair, Leo brushing his lips on the nape of my neck and Ares pressing his hand against my breast. How did I get so lucky?
Then an insistent knocking at the door jolted us all, and the men tensed.
Ares went to the door, looked through the peephole, and sighed. “Come in, Marta,” he said. I caught the annoyance in his voice.
“Whoa! Look at all of you! Be still, my heart. But chop, chop, Tashi. Time to get your spa day on.”
“What?”
“You don’t think I’d let my bestie arrive at the hottest party in Vegas without getting a complete makeover, do you? I’ve got it all planned. Massage and sugar scrub over your entire body, facial, hair, and nails. This hotel has everything! Girl, it will take all day.”
“And I suppose you’ll be right there with me?”
“Don’t you know it.”
Leo laughed. “This is perfect. Ares, please ensure that a security guard is posted discreetly nearby.”
“I will.”
“But—” I protested.
“Go,” Orion said.
“And I’ll have the gift shop bring up gowns for both of you to choose from,” Leo said.
“But in the closet—”
“Tashi,” Orion said with a sigh. “You’re not getting it, are you? All three of us can provide you with anything, even without income from the hotel.”
“That’s right,” Ares agreed. “Orion made sure we banked enough money, so we never need to work.”
“Besides,” Leo added, “the Olympus Royale is our passion project, but you are our great love.”
Orion nodded. “And we intend to showcase you at the Gala.”