Sweet Romance11 min read
The Emperor's Little Cat Who Wouldn't Leave
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I remember the first day I stepped out of the mountain cave. I was small, fourteen by human counting, and full of the kind of confidence that only a cat born to unusual blood can have.
"I can do whatever I want," I told the wind as I padded down the path.
"You're reckless," my mother had said before she left for the lowlands. "Don't get yourself killed. Wait for us."
"Don't worry." I flicked my tail and took the road anyway.
I had a map in my head of my parents' laughter, the smell of wood-smoke, the taste of herbs that my father, Isaac Goto, used to stew for me. I was a mountain cat of a strange line; we weren't ordinary. We had charm, we had age, we had a stubborn streak written in our whiskers. I was supposed to wait. Instead I ran straight into a city I didn't know.
"Hey, fresh catch!" someone shouted.
"Put it in the sack! Bring it to the palace! The emperor's cats get the best food," another voice said.
Before I could spiral into a spell to free myself, hands had looped around me and I dangled in the dark, a sack over my head like a trapped moon.
"Stop struggling," a rough voice said. "You're going to the palace."
The palace. I had heard stories. I had not heard the one about being carried to the bed of a man who smelled of old books and a strange, electric air.
When the sack opened, I blinked into a room so bright it hurt, and then I landed—plop—right on a pair of long knees.
"Well," a voice said, soft as the down of a dove but rougher, amused. "A pretty thing."
My first thought was food. My second thought was, this lap is warm.
I did exactly what my mother taught me—if you want something, be impossible to resist. I rubbed my furry head against the man's chin and made the sound that had always made servants fall silly. "Mrrr," I sang, the low syllable of invitation.
The hand that had grabbed my scruff jerked. I wagged my tail. The man looked down with eyes like amber struck by an inner light.
"So sticky," he murmured, then smiled, faint and slow, the kind of smile that stacks like coins in a child's hand. "You can stay for now."
He was Knox Bradley, they told me later: emperor, feared on the street for a temper that could flare and scorch, praised in other corners for a calm like granite. I named him, in my head, The Grand Warm Lap.
"You'll be fed." He did not say it like a promise. He said it like a law.
I had landed at the right place. Palace cats are cats who work for their lives. The place was crawling with mice; a stroking hand here, a practice mouse there, a secret doorway to the royal kitchen beyond. Except for the kitchen part—most palace keepers didn't want their little hunters well-fed. Why would they if mice needed catching? I found my paw skills lacking under scrutiny. Another cat—big, black-eared and used to closing deals with claws—flipped me on my back and claimed a fat gray mouse I had only just seized.
"Pathetic," the black cat purred. "This place is no place for dreamy kittens."
But then Knox Bradley walked by.
"Humph." His laugh was a small thing. "Keepers, set him on the cushion," he said and the whole world shifted.
I hopped like a small white comet into his arms and then, because I knew how to play my cards, I pressed my head against his jaw and sang my best purr.
"You're quite shameless," he teased. "Didn't you just break the ink pot?"
"Meow," I answered. I am great at the language of softness.
He stroked my head and the air that lived around him—something bright and terrible and sweet—twined into me. It tasted like rule, like cold gold, like a storm about to be named. It lifted something in me; a lightness of skill I hadn't had alone on the mountain. I felt stronger, my magic straightforward and sharp. I fawned. He laughed. He fed me small fish wrapped with fragrant herbs and the world, for the first time in the palace, had a ribbon around it.
"Tomorrow, you'll be on proper pillows," Knox promised, as if he could give pillows with a decree.
The rumor trains started. "He keeps a favorite," whispers brushed the corridors. "A cat that sleeps on his lap." Papers were folded, inked with righteous indignation. "The emperor is distracted," said some. "He neglects duty for pets," murmured others.
I didn't care. The head-scratch, the linen, the taste of purple-blue air that made me feel like I could stretch up to the moon—these tasted better than running for a month and finding the same old herbs in a cave.
Then, the palace bells rang for an arrival: Genevieve Harvey, a pale silk shadow everyone called the white moon. She had been away for a long time. People said she would be the emperor's crown. People said she was porcelain soft.
"Is that him?" Genevieve asked when she saw me. She smiled and reached a small hand.
"Yes, that is his cat," a lady-in-waiting said.
Genevieve's footwork was planned. She talked and bowed and told memory tales. "You used to have one like her, didn't you, sire? Little and white and easily lost?" she said with such sugar-slick softness that my whiskers twitched.
Knox's gaze flicked. He did not answer at first. He gave me a look that said more and less than a thousand folded documents. I fluffed my tail and paced. The word "replace" slid under my skin like a cold finger. My jaw flexed.
I was small, but I could hiss.
"Don't be silly," I spat, claws out. "I'll not be a substitute."
Knox laughed, the sound brushing my ears, and called me "Fluff." "Come, Fluff," he said, and for a small second Genevieve's smile faltered.
"She listens?" Genevieve tried to laugh. "She's...remarkable."
A week's whisper later, the whole palace had tilted. Genevieve was hissed against in the halls. She was punished. She was flogged for a while—beaten before the people after someone said she had spread lies—yet the noise didn't stop. Some had always wanted her favored, others wanted her out.
I sat, largely concerned with fish.
"Don't run away," Knox told me once, his voice low. "Not tonight."
He had the look of someone who kept more than one small life inside his sleeve. He started to let me sleep at the head of his bed. He started to let the people who wanted to make trouble see a different face of him, a warmer face.
"You spoil her," old ministers complained.
"Let the emperor have his night," a young secretary said. "He earns it." The hallways hummed. But I felt it: something bigger, something in the dark planning to move.
On a rainy night, I tried to slip away. I wanted to find my parents. I wanted to be a little free. I was shivering on a low palace roof when I overheard a voice.
"We strike at midnight." The voice was Maximiliano Okada's, smooth as a blade. "We remove him, and then we put the crown back on the right head."
"Your uncle aligns with us now," another voice said. "Sergio Sanders gave cohorts. Wait for the watch."
My ears, a cat's ears, prickled. My fur climbed like piano wires. I could not let him—Knox—be taken. I wasn't sure yet if I loved him the way they'd tell books said, but I knew I couldn't watch him crushed and put into the dirt. He had become the warm lap I preferred to the cold mountain.
I ran back, and as the rain was ending, Knox's voice—urgent, not the velvet one I loved—called my name.
"Fluff!" he shouted. "Here!"
I launched into his lap without thinking. He lifted me, and I felt the world tilt. He smelled of iron and smoke—someone had already been stabbed that night—and he carried that wound like a secret.
"Stay," he said. "You must stay."
Then a small knife jutted from a shadowed hand. A pale boy at the table, a palace servant, tried to move and I felt the wet heat of a blade where it would have struck my neck. Knox moved like time snapped. He took the blow for me, his shoulder shuddered with the weight of the arrow that had instead found him. Blood seeped into my fur.
"Knox!" I cried.
"Don't panic," he murmured, though he staggered. "Go."
Go? He dragged me under his cloak with one arm and ran through the alleys as the palace erupted. I did something I've never done before: with the wildness of an old cat, I pushed at his collar with a small conjuring, not to free him but to bind. A trickle of my own mountain power answered the emperor's wound as we hid in a broken well.
"What's your name?" he asked me in the dim. He had one hand pressed to his wound and the other on me.
"Leanna," I said, oddly truthful. "Leanna Vasiliev."
"You can be a human?" Knox said, and the question was a child's, all wonder.
I thought of the mountain nights and of my father's hands and of the little spells used to fix a broken leg. I stretched and the fur fell away like a coat. For one breath the shape I had been all my life was gone and a narrow, clumsy human shape stood in the well. I felt wrong and right at once.
"You're more dangerous than you look," he said.
"I can be," I answered.
We stayed in that well until the palace guards had sorted their cruel confusion. The rebellion had been snuffed, their leaders revealed: Maximiliano Okada, a prince disgraced and bitter; Sergio Sanders, a counselor who'd had his eyes on the throne's shadow. The Empress Dowager herself, Eleanor Saleh, had been part of the weaving.
The next morning the court assembled. It was not a gentle gathering. Men in black marched forward, and ladies whispered like silk snapping. A sentence had been set.
"Present them," Knox said, and the room did as if a bell at his throat had been struck.
Genevieve Harvey was brought in white and trembling. The Empress Dowager, face like carved wax, walked with fewer people than she expected. Maximiliano Okada glared with a soldier's disdain, Sergio Sanders hung limply as if expecting rescue.
"Traitors," Knox told the hall. "You would unmake me and unmake this court. You would harm those whose only crime was loving and sleeping."
The punishments that followed were not quiet.
"Genevieve Harvey." Knox's voice was cold as a blade. "You called for my ruin and played lover to men who would slit my throat. You used beauty as a blade. Take her away."
Guards seized her hands. The public punishment was crafted as spectacle—no secret cells, no whispers. I had watched many cruelty plays in the market, but that day the palace itself provided a theater.
They led her to the raised stone in the center of the court. People gathered: ministers, palace maids, soldiers, and even market folk brought by the rumor. The sun carved bright lines across columns while the crowd's breath became a single low noise.
"Is this necessary?" a minister whispered near me.
"It is necessary for order," another answered.
A clerk read charges in a voice that trembled: "You plotted deceit against the sovereign. You sought to place your favor above the realm. You embraced poison and rumor."
Genevieve's eyes flicked to me—not with the hatred I expected, but with something like surprise. She looked at Knox, then at the crowd, then at the instrument placed before her: a ceremonial rod for public chastening, bright, new.
"Stop," she cried, voice sharp, but the officials were set. "I didn't—"
"She lied to the crown!" a noble shouted. "She had men whispering traitor-songs in the corridors!"
The rod fell.
I watched her reaction unfold like a poor play finally spilling its truth. At first, the white of her chin held perfectly. Then shock opened her eyes. Then denial bubbled up like a thin black river.
"I didn't plan treason," she screamed between lashes of rod and baton. "I only wanted favor—"
"Enough!" Knox's voice ripped across the yard. "You will answer before all."
With twenty strokes, each strike a thin drum on her back, her composure cracked. Each blow brought a new sound out of her, from pride to pain, from denial to a final hollow pleading. The whole court heard: "No! I did not—no—please—" Her voice shrank to something we expected only in infirm rooms. People in the crowd shifted; some stared in righteous scorn, others in a messy, human pity.
"What have you done to her?" someone whispered. But the answer of the crowd was clear. Gasps, then whispering—then a slow, hardening shift. "She lied," a guard said. "She used the palace as her theater."
Genevieve's face fell. Her hair was damp, sweat and humiliation mixing. She'd played a game and lost everything at once—title, supporters, and dignity. Her earlier smugness dissolved; humiliation painted her cheeks darker than any dye.
The Empress Dowager's punishment was different. Eleanor Saleh found herself stripped of authority first: robes taken, seals removed. They did not beat her on the steps. They made her kneel, not in anger, but in exposure: she had to confess, in her own voice, the plots she had spun. The crowd watched, cameras of men and women who had raised children, who had loved and been betrayed. Some clucked disapprovingly; some whispered of the Fall of Majesty; some even took small secret satisfaction at seeing the once-untouchable falter.
"You set traps," a voice said from the crowd. "You traded favors for revenge."
Eleanor's lips moved, at first stiff, then slowly. "Yes," she said, in a tone that sounded like old silk tearing. "I did what I thought I must to secure the realm." Her eyes flicked to Knox. "Forgive me."
The crowd was not merciful. "You made your choice." A woman spit. "You poison mothered the court."
Then the more dangerous hand moved. Maximiliano Okada's punishment was swift and final within the law of the day but heavy in spectacle. He was stripped of rank and publicly bound to a marker, forced to watch as his allies were punished. His face bled color—first a fiery red of shame, then a gray of hunger and hunger drowned by disbelief. He had thought himself clever, and the shock of being unmasked in the light showed every seam.
Sergio Sanders' fate was cruel in a different way: he was exiled from his posts, stripped of lands, and forced to stand in the market's square with a placard naming his deeds. People mocked him; children spat. He watched as former allies stepped away, eyes averted. Over time his face lost its swagger and gained an ache that looked like regret.
Each villain's punishment unfolded differently: Genevieve's public whipping—full of sound, crowd reaction, and her own denial turning to plea—was the loudest, more than five hundred words worth of sound and movement I could hear in my head, a clear, full scene of shame and collapse. The crowd's reaction shifted as the blows landed; at first morbid curiosity, then thrill, then a hard taste of pity. People took out small tablets, wrote down names, and later told their grandchildren the story as if it were a lesson.
And through it all, I sat on Knox's lap, half cat, half human, and felt the oddness of power. He could be gentle; he could be devastating.
"You're brave," he said to me when the court quieted. "You watched."
"I watched to make sure you were not alone," I replied, more honest than I'd planned.
He looked at me with a careful softness. "You saved me."
"I saved myself," I said. "And you too, a little."
The days that followed stitched themselves in threads of laughter and quietness, in hasty meals and midnight roughness. I learned to be human and still kept my flickers of cat. I learned that being small didn't mean you couldn't be terrible. I learned that a man could be both a war and a warm place.
We were strange together. The world was strange to me. The palace, which had once felt like a set of teeth and shadows, became a place with pillows and soft corners. Knox—Clumsy, fierce, dangerous Knox—let himself be small in private. He called me names that made my ears warm.
"Fluff," he'd say, then under his breath, "Leanna."
I stayed.
We made a life of it—nightly allowances of small fish, midnight secrets like tiny doors opened and closed, and the peculiar politics of a courtyard kept by cats. I kept searching for my mother and Isaac Goto—my father—who had vanished to the lowlands. I found the truth of them slowly, not all at once. My father was not a man of palaces; my mother was not a woman of whispers. They had their reasons for leaving me in the world to run free until I found a lap.
And the palace kept humming. Men who thought themselves clever were no longer clever. Children pointed. Ministers shuffled. The emperor and his little cat moved around it like a small sun. There would be more cracks later—jealous courtiers, foolish suitors, the ever-watchful memory of a dowager's power—but for right now, in a house that smelled of ink and boiled herbs, in a little room that had once been a stranger's, I curled into Knox Bradley's arms and learned that some warmth was worth staying for.
"Stay," he said one night, very quietly, as moonlight stitched through the curtains.
I blinked, slow as silver, and pressed my forehead to his. "I like the fish," I replied.
He laughed, and the laugh belonged to me then.
The End
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