The Don Bows Only To His Curvy Crush Chapter 10
The Keycard He Placed Himself
Dante’s words drop me into a world that doesn’t feel real.
I swallow hard, throat tight. “Don’t mess with me. That’s — that’s not possible…”
“Why isn’t it?”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. Dead serious.
“You were the smartest girl I have ever seen. You could read a room in ten seconds — half the made men there couldn’t do it in an hour.”
“To me you were a little genius.”
“You couldn’t stand a bully. Someone ran his mouth about me not being capable of being an heir — you tore him apart in front of the whole kitchen.”
“I still remember your line — ‘Yeah, go ahead and juggle. Look in a mirror first and check if the stray dogs on the street would even sniff at you.'”
Dante lets out a soft laugh and brushes a tear off my cheekbone with his thumb.
“They called you fat. I never saw it.”
“You were five-foot-nine. It sat on you evenly. The parts that were supposed to be soft — ahem — anyway.”
“In my head, you were adorable.”
I stare at him, stunned.
The girl he’s describing and the girl the rest of the crew talked about are two different people entirely.
But I haven’t forgotten what he actually said back then.
I hold onto the last piece of my sanity and push back. “But — you told me to stop writing in the journal.”
“And Annabella. You said to her yourself. That I worked for you. That was all…”
Even now, all these years later, saying those sentences out loud still cuts.
“I told you to stop writing so those idiots on the crew couldn’t dig it up again. I wanted it safe.”
“And Annabella — her father was in tight with mine. My mother knew her mother.”
“If I’d said anything else, my mother would’ve heard about it by dinner and dragged me back to Sicily by the ear.”
“Back then, on paper, all we could be was the heir and his assistant.”
Before I can ask anything else, he cuts in.
“But I never wanted to just be your boss.”
“That’s why — the night my father named me heir — I heard you upstairs with a couple of the girls, playing that stupid Never Have I Ever game.”
“One of them joked she’d sleep with me for the ring.”
“Bella. You put down one of your fingers.”
My mouth falls open. His palm slides up to cup my cheek.
“If someone did anything wrong that night — it was me.”
“I wanted you. So I walked past your bag in the hallway and slipped the keycard inside. On purpose.”
“I’d had a drink for nerve, but I wasn’t drunk. I was going to tell you in the morning.
And then — you were gone.”
“I thought I’d been so bad my first time that you—”
So that’s it.
That’s why Dante has never had another woman since.
He is not scarred or disgusted.
He is wrecked — because he thought I’d left him.
Behind us the private-room door opens. Voices spill out.
Dante grabs my hand and pulls me out of the club.