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CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR ~~~
Date de publication:
2026-04-17 17:20:25
Dernier chapitre
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 EIGHTEEN
"Some friendships are so real that even nine years cannot touch what they were."SOFIAI am alive.The baby is alive.Those two facts keep cycling through me every few minutes like my brain cannot quite let them settle into something permanent. It keeps needing to confirm them. To check again. To make sure they are still true the same way they were true five minutes ago.They are.Still true.Still real.Dante is sitting in the chair beside my bed that he has clearly pulled as close to me as physically possible. His elbows are on his knees and he is leaning forward in that way of his — like he cannot quite make himself sit back and relax while I am in a hospital bed, like the distance of a few extra inches would be unreasonable.He has been talking to me for a while.Not about anything heavy. Nothing about Marco or Salvatore or Shadow or any of the enormous complicated things that are apparently happening simultaneously outside this room. Just talking. The way he talks when he wants m
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN
"Some mornings steal the air from your lungs before you even open your eyes."SOFIAThe shower in Dante's suite is warm.That's the first thing I notice when he leads me in — the warmth of it, the way the steam rises immediately and fills the marble space with something soft and quiet. The bathroom
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER SIXTY SIX
“ I WILL BE ROUGH WITH YOU IN SO MANY SWEET WAYS”SOFIA.We had to stay at the pakhan’s guest suite tonight, Marco had not yet arrived even till now and I could only wonder what was keeping him from coming, however right now I was headed to the guest suite and not to sleep all alone tonight but wit
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER SIXTY FIVE ~
"THE MOST EXQUISTE TORTURE IS THE KIND THAT MAKES YOU SMILE WHILE IT DESTROYS YOU."SOFIAThe Pakhan's estate is extraordinary.Everything about it speaks to decades of accumulated power — the kind that doesn't need to announce itself because every stone of every wall already does it quietly. The c
HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS) CHAPTER SIXTY THREE
"She walked in and the whole world forgot to breathe. So did I."DANTEI'm standing at the bottom of the staircase checking my cufflinks when I hear her.Not footsteps exactly. More like the air in the house changes. The way a room shifts when something significant enters it.I look up.And I forge
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