Submitting to My Best Friend's Dad-Chapter 724 : Insomnia

*Caterina*

When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.

No, it was more accurate to say I was scared of the night. Mom used to tell anyone around how cute it was that her little girl was scared of the monsters under the bed and the shadows that moved across the walls, but that wasn’t what I had been afraid of.

Shadows didn’t scare me. They were friends that my father would puppet with his hands across the walls, making up stories together before bed. I didn’t fear monsters, either. They were fuzzy with googly eyes and taught me lessons about kindness and safety on TV.

No, I was never afraid of the dark.

It was the nighttime that I feared—the moment when the sky began to darken and the sun disappeared, where the colors turned into shades of dark blues and purples, and to me, as a wide-eyed innocent girl, it seemed like the world turned into something wrong.

It was like everything was replaced with something that just wasn’t quite what it should be.

The night felt like a standstill, like once the sun went down everything around me was put on pause. The flowers and trees stopped growing, the warm air turned cold, and the streets became empty.

Eyes closed as we slept during the night, and I feared that one day, when I opened them back up, the world would still be that same dark and cold night, that the sun would never rise, and morning would never come.

But it always did.

Sunrise always rose to greet me every morning and eventually, I outgrew my fear of the nighttime. I learned to appreciate the hints of life that would appear within the darkness—crickets that played symphonies if you listened closely, the sounds of owls and creatures shuffling awake, the moon able to shine without the sun to block it, pushing and pulling the tide as wolves sang to its visage.

Despite that appreciation, though, the sunrise always remained my favorite time of the day.

I loved the colors that flooded the sky as the sun rose, especially on the LA skyline, where colorful clouds drifted across like fireworks. It always left me breathless.

Sometimes I used to stay up all night just to wait for the sun to bring the world back to life. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

Just like now.

The clock ticked endlessly as I sat outside our front porch, huddled up with my knees on the step. The wind was dry like it had been all week, and though the temperature had dropped without the sun, it still felt too warm to be comfortable.

I sighed, glancing at my phone in my hand one more time, hoping there would be some kind of message, anything. But of course, there wasn’t.

It had been hours since Elio had left, but it felt so much longer as the night seemed to stretch on forever. I thought of my younger self as I waited, childish and silly, but I could almost feel those same fears of nighttime creeping up on me, that time had stopped, and the sun would never rise again.

And this time, there was no one here to soothe me to sleep. The driveway was as empty as when he had first driven away.

Anxiety twisted in a merry-go-round in my stomach and if I opened my mouth, half expecting to hear the distorted carnival song playing. I sighed, resting my head on my knees as I continued to wait.

I perked up as I heard the sound of a car. The engine roared as it turned down our street, and relief overcame every bit of my anxiety as I spotted Elio’s familiar black car come through the gate. I leaped up from the step as he pulled in.

“Elio,” I said with relief as he got out of the car, an exhausted but happy look on his face once he saw me. But he frowned as he came closer.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked tensely as he reached down to grab my hands.

He was warm, similar to a furnace against my ice-cold skin. I hadn’t realized how freezing I was until then, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

“I was waiting for you,” I told him. “I didn’t realize I was cold until now. I should’ve brought a blanket.”

“Cat,” he groaned, a helpless look on his face as he rubbed my hands between his, trying to gain some warmth in them but I just smiled, happy to have him back here with me.

“What happened?” I asked as he hurriedly wrapped an arm around me, still clutching my hands, and pulled me inside.

I went willingly, only caring about his answer as he used the thumbprint to open the front door.

“Is that really important right now?” He glared at me. “You’re as cold as ice!”

“I’m always cold,” I protested, but I fell silent when he shot me a fierce glare.

I relented, letting him pamper me as he pulled me into the living room, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders, and then hurried to the kitchen. I heard the sounds of our mugs and what sounded like the coffee maker running before he came back.

I smiled, finding it a bit funny and both endearing to see how utterly attentive he was as he rushed back in with a pair of winter gloves. They were obviously his, too big for me, but he shoved them on my fingers anyway. I laughed silently to myself as he pouted when they slipped off.

Eventually, he ran back in with two mugs of hot tea and forced one of the steaming hot mugs between my poorly gloved hands. He took the other one and pulled me into his arms, sitting on the couch with me in his lap.

“I’m warm and cozy now, so can you tell me what happened?” I asked, taking a sip of the tea. It was my favorite—cinnamon.

He sighed, hugging me tighter like he was afraid I might disappear right before his eyes.

“Al is pissed,” Elio sighed frustratedly. “Teo was one of his guys before he came here. He was a newer recruit, a good kid. He went out like a champ and fought like hell, but it just wasn’t enough. He didn’t have any family, so he’s being shipped back to Italy. He’ll be buried in Eterna.”

“Where my father is,” I said quietly.

“Yes.”

He nuzzled his face into the crevice between my shoulder and neck, and I knew he was trying to find some comfort. I finished off my tea, waiting for Elio to regain himself and tell me more, and I pulled off the ridiculous gloves.

I held his hand, playing with his fingers absentmindedly as I waited and that seemed to help as he spoke up again.

“We agreed that going forward, no one is to be alone. We’ll all stick together. We usually work in pairs anyway, but Franky thinks we should focus on groups of three or more, just in case. They got Teo after being apart from his partner for only ten minutes. We’re not going to take that chance again. We’re not losing anyone else.”

I could tell how much this had affected him, how much it hurt to have this loss. It hadn’t been long since Elio had been the boss in the US and yet they already had a crisis like this. It wasn’t his fault, but he wouldn’t think of it that way.

“And the culprit?”

“We still don’t know,” Elio snapped, tightening his hands around my waist.

I flinched at the sudden pressure and he immediately let me go, relaxing his body for fear he’d hurt me.

“It’s okay, I was just surprised,” I reassured him, grabbing his hands and pulling them back to where they were.

He rested them gently around my stomach, extra careful now.

“Sorry,” he mumbled into my shoulder, his hot breath brushing across my bare skin.

“Don’t be. I can tell you’re angry and frustrated, and you have every right to be. But how could somebody be killed in broad daylight, and nobody sees a thing? What about witnesses or the security cameras?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head. “We checked everything already. We tracked Teo’s movements as far as we could, but he had disappeared. The warehouse he was working at is on the poorer side of town.” Elio sighed. “There aren’t any working surveillance cameras there.”

“What about his phone? Couldn’t you guys check the GPS on that day?” I frowned, feeling like I was throwing darts wildly at a board and missing each one by a foot and a half.

“His phone was found in his car, broken. They most likely smashed it when they took him, so we’ve got nothing there. We traced his last location there from the GPS, so that’s how we found his car. But they were smart. They covered their tracks—no tire tracks, no footprints, nothing was disturbed and the car was fully clean. It was like ghosts snatched him up and deposited him across the city for us to find.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told him firmly, shifting around in his arms so I could see his beautiful face. There was a haunted look in his eyes, one identical to those I’d seen in his father and Alessandro before him, the same look I’d seen in Tallon when he’d come to tell me my father had died in his arms. “It’s not your fault, Elio. Do not blame yourself for this.”

He leaned forward, pressing our foreheads together as his eyes closed. I could see the stress lines developing on his forehead, around his mouth and I wanted to be able to brush them away, to make him smile again. But this was something he needed to get through internally.

“Next time, it may not be one of our men, but one of their families,” Elio said softly, then he opened his eyes staring at me determinedly. “Do you understand why I want to protect you from all of this now?”

“Of course I do.” I held his head in my hands, a frown on my lips. I always understood, but I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “But who will protect you?”

Surprise flickered across his face, a hesitance I’d never seen before as my words sunk in. I’d halted him in his tracks like it was the first time he’d ever heard someone wanted to protect him. But that was what I’d been saying all along... as had his parents before me.

He sighed, giving a wry smile. “You always surprise me, Cat. You’re right. I guess we can’t guarantee anything.”

I gave him a sad smile. “I knew that all along, Elio.” I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, hugging him as tightly as I could.

I kissed him, letting my lips distract him from all the failures he’d felt he’d made in the past and all the tough decisions he would make in the future. Right now, it was just him and me.

We were alive and together, and that was all that mattered.