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CHAPTER SEVENTY NINE
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2026-05-05 22:00:56
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HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN
"Some moments are so full that the heart doesn't know whether to laugh or cry so it does both at once."SOFIAI cannot move.That is the first thing.I am standing in the middle of this garden with lights strung overhead and flowers everywhere and my daughter in front of me holding a chalkboard sign and I cannot move a single part of my body because everything has stopped working simultaneously.Four words.Mommy will you marry Daddy?In chalk. In careful letters. Held by small hands that I have kissed every night for six years.My eyes fill before I give them permission to.Isabella is watching my face with the focused attention she gives things that matter to her — reading me, checking me, waiting to see what I do next. She is so serious about her task. So committed to it. Both hands on the chalkboard, chin slightly up, giving me the full presentation.She practiced this.The thought arrives and does something to me. She practiced walking across this garden holding this sign. Someon
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX
"The best moments are the ones you never saw coming."SOFIAIsabella talks the whole way home from school.This is standard. She has always been this way — the school day builds up inside her like pressure and the moment she sees me at the gate it all comes out in a rush. Today it is something about a project on the solar system and how Chiara got to be Jupiter and Isabella wanted to be Jupiter but she ended up being Saturn which she has decided is actually better because of the rings.I listen and nod and ask the right questions and carry her bag and walk beside her in the Italian afternoon and feel the particular fullness that this specific part of my day gives me now.School pickup.Such a small ordinary thing.Such an enormous thing to me.We get home and she has a snack and tells Dante about Saturn with the same intensity she told me and he listens with the same seriousness he gives everything she says, which she notices and absorbs and does not comment on but which I can see set
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
“YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN NOT HIDE”MARCOThe airfield is small and private and grey in the early morning light. My car pulls to the side of the jet and I get out with the single bag I have been living out of for a week and I look at the plane and I feel the first thing in seven days that is close
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER NINETY NINE
"THE PROBLEM WITH RUNNING IS THAT YOU HAVE TO KEEP RUNNING FOREVER."MARCOThe apartment is a place nobody knows about.That is the whole point of it.I bought it three years ago under a name that is not my name through a company that cannot be traced back to anything that is mine. A small place on
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER NINETY SIX
"THE THING ABOUT DEATH IS THAT IT ONLY WORKS IF YOU ACTUALLY STAY DEAD."DANTE"You moved again," Elena says from across the room."I breathed," I tell her. "That's all.""Your breathing looks a lot like trying to sit up.""Your medical opinion looks a lot like something I didn't ask for."She cros
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER NINETY FOUR
"THE MOST PAINFUL BETRAYALS ARE THE ONES THAT WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE BETRAYALS AT All."SOFIAThe cramping comes and goes.Each time it comes it is slightly stronger than the last and each time I tell myself the same thing — stress, exhaustion, the body reacting to fear and each time it is slightly
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