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CHAPTER FORTY
publish date:
2026-03-31 20:17:43
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HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE
"PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF EVERYTHING THAT HURT YOU. IT IS LEARNING TO BREATHE PROPERLY AGAIN DESPITE IT."SOFIADante is hiding something.I cannot tell you exactly what it is or exactly when I started noticing it but it has been building for about two weeks now and I know him well enough to know that the particular quality of his distraction is not the usual kind.The usual kind — meetings, security, the endless machinery of being Pakhan — has a specific texture. He goes quiet in a focused way. His eyes go somewhere specific even when he is in the room. His phone is in his hand more than usual.This is different.This distraction has a warmth to it that the other kind does not. He will be in the middle of a normal conversation and something will cross his face — a thought, a plan, something he is working out internally — and then he will look at me and there is something in that look that is deliberate. Like he is confirming something.And then it is gone.And he says nothing.I h
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR
"THE BRAVEST THING A DANGEROUS MAN CAN DO IS CHOOSE TO BE SOFT FOR THE RIGHT PERSON."DANTEI have sat across tables from men who wanted me dead and felt nothing.I have walked into rooms where the air was thick with threat and kept my pulse exactly where it needed to be. I have negotiated in four languages while bleeding from a wound nobody in the room was supposed to know about. I have done things that required a steadiness of nerve that most people spend their entire lives not needing.None of that prepared me for this.A proposal.I am sitting on Vivian's sofa thinking about a ring and the right words and the right moment and my palms are doing something that I am going to categorize as temperature related.Dante Valentino. Pakhan. Feared across countries.Nervous about proposing to a woman.Sofia specifically. Which should make it easier — she is Sofia, she is mine, she has been mine since we were kids — and somehow makes it considerably harder because it is Sofia and it needs t
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TWO
"THE PROBLEM WITH SECRETS IS THEY ALWAYS PICK THE WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT TO BECOME COMPLICATED."VIVIANMy brain does several things simultaneously in the two seconds after I hear Dante's voice through the door.First it confirms that yes, that is definitely Dante Valentino standing outside my apartment at this hour.Second it registers that Nico Barbieri — the man I have been meeting in secret for three months, the man nobody is supposed to know about, the man who is currently standing in my living room looking entirely too calm for this situation is also here.Third it begins the extremely rapid calculation of how to get from current situation to a situation where those two facts do not exist in the same space at the same time.I move."Vivian—" Nico starts."Shh." I grab my jacket from the floor where it landed. Yank it back on. Look at my reflection in the dark window for half a second hair presentable enough, hickey covered, expression approximating normal. Good enough."Just open
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE
"The problem with no strings attached is that someone always starts pulling at them anyway."VIVIANThe girls night was exactly what I needed.Sofia laughing across a table from me. Too much food. The comfortable back and forth of two people who knew each other before life got complicated and are finding their way back to that knowing despite everything that happened in between.I needed that more than I admitted to anyone including myself.I am thinking about it on the drive back to my apartment — replaying the dinner, the laughter, the moment Sofia clocked the hickey on my neck and I nearly choked on my water. That woman sees too much. She always has. It is one of the things I love most about her and occasionally find genuinely inconvenient.The hickey.I reach up and touch my neck briefly in the darkness of the car.I specifically told him not to do that.I said it clearly. I used plain language. I was very direct about it because I am always very direct about things — it is one of
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
"Three months is not long enough to forget. But it is long enough to start remembering what safe feels like."SOFIAThree months.It doesn't feel like three months. It feels both shorter and longer than that simultaneously — the way time moves when you have been through something significant and your body and your mind are processing it at different speeds and neither of them has agreed on a timeline yet.Three months since the stress, anguish, pain and constant difficulties we’ve had to deal with.We are in Italy now.Dante's compound outside Florence — a place I had never seen before we moved in but that felt immediately like somewhere built to keep people safe rather than just to keep people. High walls. Careful security. The kind of place that Dante has spent years making into something that cannot be easily touched.It took Isabella approximately forty eight hours to decide she loved it.She made her assessment on the second morning — standing in the garden with her hands on her
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN
"The thing about blind spots is that you never see them until someone else points at them."DANTEThe corridor outside Sofia's room is not comfortable.There are chairs — the standard hospital variety, designed by someone who clearly never had to sit in one for longer than five minutes — and I have been in one of them for considerably longer than five minutes staring at a closed door and trying not to think about how long fifteen minutes has turned into.Vivian has been in there for thirty seven minutes, what could see even speaking about?I look at the closed door.I cannot hear anything through it which is probably good. Raised voices would mean stress and stress is the one thing Elena told me specifically to keep away from Sofia and so silence from that room should be reassuring.It is slightly less reassuring than it should be because I do not know what is happening in there and I do not know Vivian and I do not trust things I cannot see clearly.Which is most things, most of the
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE
"Some gifts arrive from hands you cannot see. The question is whether you trust them."DANTEThe car is cold.Everything in Moscow is cold but the car has its own particular cold — the residual chill of a vehicle that has been sitting in Russian winter air for longer than its heating system can ful
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
"THE LONGEST DRIVES ARE THE ONES WHERE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DRIVING TOWARD."DANTEI don't remember getting to the car.One moment I am in the corridor of the safe house with Elena's voice still in my ear and the next I am in the passenger seat and Luca is driving and the city is moving past
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
"THE MOMENT YOU THINK YOU HAVE WON IS THE MOMENT THE WORLD REMINDS YOU THAT YOU HAVEN'T."DANTEThe safe house sits on twelve acres outside the city.Most people would not call it a safe house if they knew what the back half of the property was used for. Safe house implies protection, refuge, somew
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
SO IT DOES BOTH AT ONCE."SOFIAThe morning is quieter than most.That is the thing I notice first when I wake up. The particular quality of the light coming through the curtains and the sounds of the house settling around me — Elena moving somewhere downstairs, Isabella's voice talking to one of h
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