"Living the dream," I mutter, but I smile. Because she's right. I did do it. I got my degree, proved I'm more than just a pretty face my father can auction off to whatever capo or underboss needs a wife.
For four years, I got to be normal. Or as normal as someone like me can be.
Though normal is relative. Even here, even tonight with vodka in my blood and Chloe's chaos energy doing its best to distract me, I can't fully turn it off.
The club's owner is at the bar. I clocked him twenty minutes ago — the way he keeps checking his watch, the way his eyes track the floor managers, the specific anxiety of someone watching cash flow in real time. The VIP section is at sixty percent capacity on a night that should be eighty. Overstaffed by at least four people relative to what I can see coming through the door.Someone's either over-ordering to skim from the top, or the cover charge numbers are being reported wrong.
"You're doing the face," Tiana says.
"What face?"
"The one where you're auditing something in your head."
"I'm not—" I stop. "The owner's losing money tonight and he doesn't know why yet."
Chloe stares at me. "We're celebrating. Can you maybe turn off the forensic accountant brain for one night?"
"It's not a switch. It's just how I see things."
Tiana squeezes my hand. "We know. We love you anyway." She grins and raises her glass. "To Aurora Olivera, the only person I know who made financial accounting sound sexy."
"To Aurora," Chloe echoes, "who will definitely lose her virginity before she turns into a nun."
"I hate you both."
"You love us."
They're not wrong. I do love them. I met Tiana when we were fourteen, at a charity fundraiser neither of us wanted to attend. My father had sent me in a dress I hated, and her father had dragged her along because appearances mattered more than comfort in both our worlds.
We found each other hiding behind a dessert table, eating tiny pastries with our fingers and pretending we weren’t listening to men who spoke too quietly and smiled too sharply.
She looked at me, powdered sugar on her lips, and said, “Your dad scares people.”
I said, “Yours too.”
We’d been inseparable ever since.
Chloe crashed into our lives two years later—literally.
She knocked over my stack of textbooks in the school hallway, tripped over her own feet trying to apologize, and somehow managed to insult my shoes while doing it.
“They’re ugly,” she said, wincing. “But like… in an expensive way.”
Tiana laughed. I stared.
Chloe grinned like she’d just won something. “Hi. I think we’re friends now.”
And somehow—annoyingly—she was right.
We clink glasses, and I let the vodka burn its way down my throat. The DJ switches tracks, something with a heavier beat, and the crowd on the dance floor swells. I should feel it, that pull to move, to lose myself in the music. But I just feel tired.
Three weeks.
Then I see him.
He's in the VIP section, raised above the main floor like some kind of king surveying his kingdom. Silver hair—not gray, but actual silver, the kind that catches the light and makes you think of expensive things, dangerous things. The kind of hair that shouldn't be sexy but on him? On him it's devastating. He looks maybe forty, maybe older, but age sits on him like power. Like he's earned every year and made them all count.
A suit that probably costs more than most people's cars, tailored so perfectly it might as well be a second skin. Black, crisp, the kind of formal that says money and taste and don't-fuck-with-me all at once. Broad shoulders. Strong jaw. The kind of face that's seen things, done things, survived things.
