Chapter 175 Luca

Chapter 175 Luca
I stood in the arched stone doorway of the estate’s main kitchen, my arms crossed tightly over my chest as I watched the two most beautiful people in my life try to figure out how to operate a cheap, electric hand mixer.

"Luca, tell her she’s doing it wrong," Lila complained, her voice a high-pitched, indignant whine. She was standing precariously on a sturdy wooden stool, her small hands caked in sticky batter, pointing a finger directly at my mate. "The recipe on the back of the box says we need to mix it until the lumps are gone. Aria is leaving all the lumps."

Aria looked up from the mixing bowl, her hair tied back in a messy, chaotic bun that was currently held together by a stray wooden chopstick. She had a smudge of white flour right across the bridge of her nose.

"The lumps hold the flavour, little wolf," Aria countered. "If you over-mix it, they turn into rubber. Do you want to eat rubber pancakes for breakfast?"

Lila wrinkled her nose, looking down at the bowl with childish skepticism. "No. But Mason said you don't know anything about wolf cooking because you don't eat raw steak."

"Mason is a brute who thinks ketchup is a gourmet sauce," I said, finally stepping into the room.

I walked up behind Aria, my hands sliding naturally around her waist, pulling her back against my chest. I buried my face in the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of her lavender soap and the crisp autumn air that always seemed to cling to her skin.

"See?" Aria said, leaning back into my touch without a single second of hesitation, her head tilting to look up at me with a soft, knowing smile. "Your Alpha agrees with me. Lumps are mandatory."

"You two are ganging up on me because I'm small," Lila muttered, though the corners of her mouth twitched upward as she grabbed a handful of chocolate chips and aggressively dumped them into the batter.

I looked at my little sister, watching the way she moved without looking over her shoulder, the way her shoulders weren't tight with the frantic, survivalist paranoia that our father had beaten into both Lila and me from the moment we could walk. She was growing up in a house where the windows didn't have iron bars anymore, where the Great Hall echoed with laughter instead of the cracking of fists against bone.

We were building a new normal, a quiet, domestic sanctuary right in the middle of a territory that had known nothing but war for a generation. My father was defending a rigid, isolated fence line, convinced that love was just another word for total surrender. But looking at the messy counter, feeling the vibrant life pulsing through the kitchen, I knew his old rules were entirely dead.

"Go wash your hands, Lila," I murmured, my voice dropping into a low, affectionate rumble as I reached out to ruffle her dark hair, knocking loose a tiny cloud of flour. "If Mason catches you eating half the chocolate chips before they hit the griddle, he’s going to start a border war in the dining room."

"He wouldn't dare," Lila said proudly, though she hopped down from the stool and scrambled out of the kitchen, her bare feet pattering loudly down the hallway toward the bathroom.

When the door clicked shut behind her, the kitchen went entirely quiet, save for the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock and the low hiss of the preheating griddle. Aria turned around in my arms, her palms resting flat against the leather of my jacket, her hazel eyes searching mine with that deep, uncanny clarity that always made my breath hitch. She reached up, her thumb gently wiping away a stray spec of dust from my jawline, her touch hot and entirely real.

"You're thinking too loud again, Luca," she whispered softly, her eyes holding mine.

"I'm just looking at my family," I said honestly, my hands sliding down to lock around the small of her back, pulling her close enough that our heartbeats synchronized into one single beat. "I spent nineteen years waiting for the sky to fall in this house, Aria. I didn't think it was possible to just breathe in the morning."

"It's possible because you chose peace," she murmured, leaning up to press a soft, lingering kiss against my lips, the golden light of our bond flaring behind my eyelids in a brilliant, warm wave. "The elders are quiet, the town is safe, and we have everything we need right inside these walls."

I let out a slow, breathy chuckle, the last of the shadows from my father's legacy finally settling into the dust of the floorboards. "Yeah. We do."

But the domestic peace of the Hale estate was always a beautiful, fragile illusion, a glass dome waiting for a single rock to shatter it into a thousand sharp pieces.

Before Aria could pull away to tend to the burning griddle, the heavy oak backdoor of the kitchen was violently slammed against the stone wall with a terrifying, echoing crash that shook the copper pots from their hooks.

The cold mountain wind rushed into the warm room, carrying a scent that made my blood instantly turn to liquid ice.

Damian stumbled across the threshold, his chest heaving violently under his torn leather jacket, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side as dark, thick blood dripped steadily onto the clean linoleum. His eyes weren't amber; they were a wild, blown-out yellow of a wolf completely consumed by raw, primal panic.

"Luca," Damian choked out, his voice a ragged, bloody gasp as he collapsed against the edge of the granite counter, his teeth bared in pure agony. "The northern outpost, it's gone. The Hunters didn't just cross the fence. They brought the heavy artillery, and they’re moving down the main highway right toward the high school."

I looked out the open door, my eyes locking onto the northern ridge where a massive, billowing pillar of thick black smoke was currently cutting the beautiful morning sky right in half.