Page 74 of My Wedding Night Massacre

"No, listen! Think about it. All those guys on campus, they're what, twenty-two? Twenty-three? They're basically children. They still think pizza counts as a romantic dinner. Meanwhile, you—" she waves her hand at me, "—you've been running your father's books since you were sixteen. Laundering money for the family business. You're basically thirty in your brain."

"That's not how brains work," Tiana says, but there's weight in her voice. She knows what I am. What my family is. The Olivera name doesn't just open doors—it kicks them off their hinges, and sometimes people don't survive the entrance.

"You know what I mean. She needs someone mature. Someone who's actually lived. Someone who's not going to piss himself the second he finds out her dad's a mafia Don."

I fish my phone out of my clutch and pull up the notes app. The bucket list stares back at me, mocking.

Aurora Olivera's Bucket List (Age 18):

Get into top accounting program ✓

Make real friends ✓

Travel outside the country ✓

Learn to drive stick shift ✓

Get drunk in a foreign city ✓

Stand up to Dad at least once ✓

Willingly lose virginity to someone I actually choose

Own something Dad's money didn't buy ✓

Seven out of eight. Not bad, except the one I'm missing is the one that matters. The one that's supposed to make me feel like I own my body, like I'm not just some pawn waiting to be traded off in my father's next alliance.

Four days. That's all I have left before I go home. Before I step back into that world of arranged marriages and family obligations and being Luca's daughter instead of just Aurora.

"Stop looking at that thing," Chloe snatches my phone. "Tonight's about celebrating, remember? You're a certified accountant! You can legally bore people with tax law now!"

"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."