Lily's POV
I honestly didn’t expect the dinner to feel this light after everything that had happened over the past few days. I thought this team event would crush me with awkwardness. But it didn’t. Not at first, anyway.
The private dining hall Dante had arranged was gorgeous in that intimidating, expensive way I’d come to associate with anything connected to him. But my team was too excited to notice any of that. For the first twenty minutes, I blended into the noise, letting myself relax. Nobody was watching me. Nobody was studying my reactions. I wasn’t “the representative who impressed the CEO” or “the woman sitting beside Dante at the head of the table.” I was just Lily. I needed the normalcy.
When we all sat down, I ended up exactly where I’d dreaded, right beside Dante, at the h
