Alisha sat back in her seat, or at least she tried to. Her posture said she was relaxed, but her mind was anything but.
The voices around her were muffled, a blend of champagne-fueled laughter and the clinking of glasses, but none of it really reached her. Her focus was somewhere else entirely—on the plan she'd been turning over in her mind all evening. She needed to slip away from this glittering, suffocating party without raising suspicion, find Ryan, and handle the matter waiting for her at their hideout.
The problem was timing. If she disappeared too soon, Katherine's hawk eyes would catch it. Dante would notice too. He had that way of looking at her like he knew when she was about to do something he wouldn't like. Worse, she could already imagine her phone buzzing relentlessly with his name lighting up the screen, his voice cutting in while she was trying to deal with the kind of people who didn't knock before entering your nightmares.
