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of them ringing all the way down into her soul. It felt like a sin to speak them, but the good kind of sin; one of the ones involving lust and gluttony and sloth, like staying in bed on a Sunday morning to make love and sleep and nibble on decadent pieces of dark, rich chocolate. Possibly all at the same damned time. She knew that if any of her pack could hear her words, they’d assume she’d lost her mind. Hell, if any nonsubmissive wolf in the whole damned world could hear, they’d think the same damned thing. Dominant wolves always wanted to lead. Period. The end. Happily ever after, and all those old clichés.
    So, maybe Honor wasn’t so dominant after all?
    She thought about that, mulled it over, tested out the taste and feel of it while the sounds of weighted tree branches settling and night critters scurrying drifted in through her open window.
    It was a more complicated question than it seemed, but then, among Lupines, dominance was a complicated issue. No matter what their furry instincts might tell them at times, Lupines were not wolves. Not entirely. They could take the shape of wolves, they shared some physical, some psychological, and even some emotional characteristics with wolves, but they had their human sides, too. They might have the instincts to rip out the throats of any people who angered them, but they had the ability to reason through why that might not be a good idea. They might understand that one of the best ways to get to know someone was to take a good whiff of their scent, but they still knew better than to greet newcomers by sticking their noses into other people’s crotches.
    Like wolves, but not wolves; like humans, but not humans.
    Among wolves, packs really amounted to little more than families, and in those families, the oldest—and therefore most often the strongest—male led the way. It was, if not simple, then at least a fairly straightforward and logical method of organization among animals, but when you factored in the human side of a Lupine’s nature, any thoughts of logic and straightforwardness flew right out the nearest window.
    Lupine packs were definitely not family groups. They contained families, but because of their integration into wider human society, they needed to become more than that. Instead, wolf shapeshifters grouped in territorial packs, with all of the Lupines in a designated geographical area falling under the authority of the alpha of that area. In the beginning, it had probably started as a security measure, allowing all the Lupines in a community to keep an eye on each other and protect each other against threats from hunters, witch hunters, werewolf hunters, and the like. Over the centuries, it had become a political measure, maintained in order to keep the peace among groups of Lupines with no relationship to each other, to temper their natural instincts to get to the top of the food chain. Lupine alphas spent less time making sure everyone in the pack was fed and more time making sure they didn’t eat each other, to be blunt, something that required managing not only wolfish instincts, but human egos, emotions, and psychodramas. Frankly, Honor would rather lead an actual wolf pack any day of the week. At least wolves didn’t lie to each other.
    Honor rolled onto her side and punched her pillow into shape, ignoring the twinge in her aching knuckles. With her Lupine metabolism, such a small discomfort would be gone by morning, but it was the only one of her problems that would be. When the sun rose, she might feel physically better, but she’d still be the reluctant alpha of an endangered pack, with a meddlesome stranger breathing down her neck and half of her childhood friends gunning for her blood. Her only real choice was what to do about it.
    If she honestly didn’t want to be alpha, should she just step down? Just give her place to Paul or Darin or one of the other males who hadn’t hesitated to tell her that a female would never be fit to rule