Lucas Whitmore had been Alpha of Silver Fang for three years.
He had navigated the transition from his father's death to his own leadership at twenty-six — young, by Alpha standards, but Silver Fang had not had the luxury of waiting for young Lucas to feel ready. The pack had needed an Alpha and he had become one, the way all urgently-necessary things became real: before you understood what you were doing, and then suddenly all the way.
In three years, he had handled a rogue wolf situation in the northern territory that had required him to spend eleven days in the wilderness tracking a man who had been a member of the pack for fifteen years. He had adjudicated an inheritance dispute between two founding families that had nearly split the pack in two. He had sat with dying members through
