I walk out of Martins’ office, and the world is fundamentally different. The Las Vegas I see now isn’t the one I saw an hour ago. Before, it was a city of ghosts and regrets, a backdrop for my own personal heartbreak. Now, the ghosts have names, and the regrets have been forged into a weapon. The neon glow that washes over the afternoon streets no longer looks like a party; it looks like an open wound, the glittering, infected circuitry of a corrupt machine that my brother and I are about to try and dismantle from the inside. Every laughing tourist, every spin of a slot machine, every clinking champagne glass in a high-roller suite feels like a desecration of my mother’s memory. They built this empire on her ashes, and I’m the only one who can make them choke on them.
My mission is no lon
