Chapter 179 Luca

Chapter 179 Luca
The screen of her laptop was still glowing in the dark study.

I stood over the oak desk, my knuckles resting flat on the wood as I stared at the open tab. 'Boston University—Undergraduate Admissions.' There was an acceptance letter on the screen, a neat block of text decorated with a digital red seal, offering a full academic scholarship to a girl who had spent the last three months redrawing the political borders of a werewolf territory.

“She's going to leave,” the predator inside me snarled. “She belongs to the ridge. She belongs to the throne.”

I slammed the laptop shut. Aria was currently fast asleep in our bedroom down the hall. She wasn't running tonight. She wasn't packing her three cardboard boxes into a U-Haul.

I couldn't stay in the house. Ten minutes later, my heavy boots were on the gravel path leading to the small pine cabin on the southern edge of the property.

When I pushed open the cabin door without knocking, the small room was thick with the scent of dry rot, woodsmoke, and the bitter, unmistakable musk of a dying Alpha. Dorian Hale sat in his low wooden rocking chair by the brick hearth, a faded wool blanket thrown over his knees.

He didn't look up when I stepped inside. His milky, ancient eyes remained fixed on the low orange flames licking at the pine logs in the stove.

"You're breathing like a wolf who’s trapped in a snare, Luca," he grunted. "The border scouts reported no rogue activity on the line tonight. If you're here to growl at my furniture because you can't handle the administration of the pack, go back to your desk."

I didn't answer right away. For nineteen years, a conversation with this man had been a chess match of survival—a vicious cycle of broken bones, cold commands, and an absolute ban on any form of vulnerability. If I had admitted to an insecurity when I was sixteen, he would have dragged me to the training circle and beaten me until I learned how to hide the crack in my armor.

"She got into a university out east," I spat out. "Boston. They offered her a full ride."

"You think she’s going to trade the pack-link for a brick building and a crowd of strangers who don't know the definition of a First Command."

"She belongs in that world, Dad," I admitted. "She spent her whole life planning an escape from Silverpine. She had spreadsheets. She had budgets for apartments in New York. I look at her, and the bond feels like an unbreakable mountain. She’s human. She deserves a life where people don't try to shoot her with silver arrows just to prove a point to me."

My father let out a low, rattling sigh that sounded less like a retired Alpha and more like a father who had finally run out of enemies to fight.

"When your mother first came to this ridge, Luca," Dorian said softly, "she didn't have a wolf either. She was a city girl from the coast, used to bright lights, paved roads, and people who spoke with manners instead of teeth. I spent the first five years of our marriage hovering over her like a hawk. I put guards outside her greenhouse. I forbade her from taking the truck into the valley alone. I thought if I kept the fence high enough, she would forget there was an ocean out there."

I turned away from the window, looking at him in the dim light.

"Did she forget?" I asked.

"No," Dorian whispered. "She didn't forget. She just grew thin. She stopped painting. She looked at me across the dinner table like I was the jailer instead of her mate. It wasn't until she got sick that I realized what I had done. I had built a cage out of my own fear, and I had called it protection."

He reached out with a trembling hand, his gnarled fingers extending toward me across the short distance between us. I walked over, dropping my leather jacket onto the floorboards, and sat down on the low wooden stool across from him, our knees nearly touching under his wool blanket.

"An Alpha's instinct is to conquer land and guard the perimeter, Luca," my father said, his hand coming to rest heavily on my shoulder. His grip lacked the crushing, bone-deep power it used to have, but the weight of it was entirely different now. "But a mate isn't a territory. You can't mark her with a boundary stone. If Aria stays in this valley because you've wrapped your wolf around her throat so tight she can't breathe, you're going to lose the heart of this house anyway."

"I don't know how to let her walk across that bridge without wanting to pull her back," I muttered, my knuckles clenching against my jeans.

"You trust the roots you grew," Dorian said. "You let her go to the university if she wants to. You let her taste the human life. Because if the bond is real—if what you two built at that ridge is as strong as Marcus says it is—she won't be running away from Silverpine. She’ll just be extending our borders to Boston."

The tension that had been twisting in my stomach since I closed the laptop finally loosened, a warm, golden wave of relief washing over my mind. I looked at the man who had been my tormentor for two decades, and for the first time in my life, the old war between us was completely dead. There was only peace.

"Thanks, Dad," I said softly.

"Go back to your bed, Alpha," Dorian muttered, his head sinking into the high back of the chair. "Your Luna is going to wake up cold, and a real leader doesn't let his fire go out before the winter freeze."

As I walked back toward the estate, looking up at the bedroom window where my mate was waiting, I knew my father had finally given me the only weapon I actually needed to keep her. Trust.