All Chapters of HIS BUTTERFLY (BETWEEN TWO DONS): Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

"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

"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

"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

"Some nights stay with you forever — not because of what happened in them, but because of how full they made you feel."The garden erupts the second Dante stands up and kisses me.Luca is first — practically launching himself across the space, pulling Dante into a hug that nearly knocks him off balance."FINALLY," he announces to everyone "Do you know how long I have been carrying this secret? I have been holding it for WEEKS. I am the worst secret keeper in this entire family and I did it. I did the impossible.""You told three different waiters here while we were setting up," Nico says, appearing behind him with far more composure but an expression that is unmistakably warm underneath it."That is not the same as telling Sofia," Luca says with dignity.I am still looking at the ring.I cannot stop looking at the ring.It catches the warm overhead lights every time I move my hand even slightly and something about that small movement of light keeps pulling my attention back to it like

"The most dangerous thing about the wrong person is how right they make everything feel."VIVIANThe kitchen is quiet and calm, exactly what I needed to get awya from the noise and overwhelming exhaustion.Everyone is still in the sitting room going through venue photographs and arguing about chair arrangements and whether the ceremony should face the garden or face the house and I slipped away to get water because I needed thirty seconds of not being in a room where Nico Barbieri is sitting four feet away from me pretending to read something while I can feel his attention on me like a second temperature in the room.I fill a glass from the tap.I stand at the counter and drink it and breathe and give myself the small speech I give myself with increasing frequency these days which is that this arrangement is under control and I am under control and everything is fine.Then a hand slides around my waist from behind and I startle so hard water goes everywhere."Nico." I spin around. He