Sweet Romance17 min read
The Emperor's Little Cat: My Life, My Tricks, My Throne
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I remember the year I first came to the palace: I was fourteen, and to any ordinary eye I was only a small white cat that liked to nap in sunlight and act like the kind of trouble no one could stay mad at. I remember my first breath inside that enormous place—the smell of incense, linen, iron, the hush of servants moving like water. I thought I would be a guest for a night and then run back to the mountains.
"I won't be a good girl," I told the sky as I slipped through the gate. "I'm not built for sitting still."
"You're the kind of cat that makes rules useless," my mother had said before she left. "Your blood is not ordinary. Be clever."
"Be clever," I promised—then promptly got lost.
They captured me in a cloth bag like I was no different from any alley kitten. I could have vanished on the breeze, but hunger and curiosity have a way of tying a tail to a human world. In the bag someone murmured, "One of the palace cats, maybe. Bring it."
"Bring it," my claws thought, then did nothing. I had a plan: charm. My mother taught me the ways.
When the guard first shoved me out of the damp sack, a black cat snatched a plump rat before I had a chance. I leapt for the nearest comfortable thing: a man's knees.
"Meow," I purred and rubbed my soft head against the strong chin. I made the sound my mother taught me for pleading and mischief—a sound that said "I am harmless" and "I am delightful" at once.
The man looked down. His fingers tightened on my scruff for a single breath. He hesitated; then he laughed that small, unexpected laugh.
"He's different," a voice said nearby.
"He'll be pet and fed. Keep him," the first voice decided.
So I stayed.
"You're home," I told the empire, and I curled on the man's lap like a small sun.
He was called Grayson Morozov; when people spoke of him they hissed a hundred names I did not yet need to remember—tyrant, ruthless, stone-faced. He was none of that in private. He had fine bones, the kind of hands that could make treaties and break hearts, and when he laughed, I discovered he had been waiting a long time to do so.
"How glib," he murmured the first night, when I knocked a pen off the desk and watched the ink blossom like a little midnight moon on paper. He lifted me by the scruff; I blinked at him, full of guile.
"Meow," I said.
"You're a mouthful," he said, and then, to my secret delight, he began to push me gently with his chin. "Stick close," he whispered. "You do me a curious sort of good."
Curious was a kind word. His purple air—he had a strange thing around him the palace called imperial qi—tasted of storms, of seriousness, and it filled me with warmth like the sun slipping into my fur. I sucked it in once, twice.
"Do not take too much of that," I warned myself. "Fairy's milk comes expensive."
He told no one this, but after the first night he slept with me cradled between his arms. He slept without screaming nightmares for the first time in years. I was his comfort; he was my boon.
"You're spoiling the whole court," an old eunuch said once as he shuffled paper toward Grayson.
"Keep the papers," Grayson replied, and offered me another fish. "Let the world grumble. Keep the warmth."
"Meow," I answered with a satisfied crunch between my teeth.
I had not been pawned straight into silk and shore-headed servants without reason. The palace had a plague of rats. The imperial kitchen needed hunters, and the palace used cats as labor. They expected me—some white, some grey, some common alley cats—to perform tasks. Feed them well and they would kill the vermin. Feed them poorly and they served as lively theater for the real mice.
I do not eat mice. I have a more refined palette and a higher tolerance for trickery.
"If you want to be a palace cat," my father, Ruben Cash, had always said, "you must act like the throne is your bed."
I acted like that bed belonged to me before I had learned how to climb it.
"Are you fond of her?" someone asked, fanning themselves at court.
"I am fond of my sleep," Grayson said, but he fed me and laughed when I toppled the inkstone and pretended ignorance.
"She knocked down your seal," the eunuch protested, gathering up the scattered papers. "Our Emperor's seal!"
"She only plays," Grayson said, calm as a wave. "Let her play."
I pushed and nudged; I chewed the tassels; a pen fell. He watched me with that ridiculous blend of patience and a possessive look that curled warm in my chest.
"I will not be conquered," I told him, and then I head-butted his jaw.
"You are insufferable," he said, and his smile showed as much fondness as he could afford.
He was a man with a crown, but who could wrap teeth and warmth around such a small thing and claim he wasn't human?
I began to learn the palace, not by stealth but by negotiation. When the mouse squeaked up onto the bed, I would swat it, then look to Grayson as if I had saved his life. When he slept poorly, I would curl and hum until the night released him. He was terrible at asking for help; I became quite practiced in offering it.
"She is special," the head of the kitchen said to anyone who would listen. "She eats more than the rest."
"She is a cat," Grayson responded, amusement thin in his voice.
"She is a problem," the old doctor said.
"She is necessary," Grayson answered. "You all prefer a quiet ruler over conspiracies, do you not?"
They said I had made him softer. They said he petted me in ways no one else in the court had seen him touch another living being. They said I had turned his kind heart into a place that could still be dangerous. Dangerous? I purred at the discovery. Dangerous could be useful.
Then the white moonlight came back.
She arrived with an entire court's worth of light at dawn—the kind of arrival that required a parade and a soft, cooing chorus. She wore white and smelled of thin, sweet perfume. Her name was Eliza Cardoso, and everyone whispered, "The future empress."
"Is she beautiful?" I asked Grayson once, lying on the window sill.
"She is arranged," he said. Then he leaned over to scratch my ear with a tenderness he did not give the world. "Do not bother. She will be what she intends."
Eliza was careful. She smiled like a coin polished to catch the sun, and she studied me as if I were ornament rather than creature. When she stepped near the throne for the first time, she was praised for her demureness.
"You like that sort?" I asked, flicking my tail.
"I do not need your counsel," he replied, and yet that night he lay holding me like a secret. "I find myself distracted by little things. You are a little thing I can hold."
I had a flare of jealousy I could not admit—because how could a small, mischievous cat compete with the carved image of a perfect bride? I let myself be jealous for a moon. Then I discovered something else: Eliza's hands trembled when they reached toward me—not from love, but from calculation.
"She wants to be close to you," a maid confided. "She says the Emperor had a kitten once, and she remembers it. She thinks animal ties are a key. She will charm him."
"Charm him?" I sniffed. "She would have to steal a lifetime."
I watched her approach, gentle as silk, offering me a hand like an offering.
"Come," Eliza said in a voice made of rivers. "Come play with me."
I moved closer, suspicious. Her hand smelled faintly of mint and something sharp—medicinal. I tore my eyes away.
"Her hands smell of herbs," I told Grayson later. "They are not honest."
"Are you jealous?" he asked. "Is she prettier than you?"
"She is polite," I said, which was diplomatic.
"She will be punished if she harms you," he said. He mean it—then. He said: "If anyone lays a hand on you where you do not wish it, there will be consequences."
He had a strange, cold humor that could be as sharp as the blade he wore. I liked that he named consequences; it meant he would use them.
That day a knot of tea and light connected into events no one in the palace predicted. Eliza wandered the courtyard to appear sorrowful and found herself swarmed by the untamed palace cats—most of them grey, most of them with no claim on the throne. They smelled the catnip lightly tucked into her sleeves and went wild. She flailed, tripping, hands at fur and face.
"Help! Help!" she cried in the high, bright voice that had won many a seat. "My dress! These beasts are out of control!"
The cats had a rough time of it. They clawed and purred and dragged at her skirts. The court gasped. I sat on a wall and watched the show, whiskers twitching; it was entertaining.
Then Eliza did the unthinkable. She ran to the Empress's mother and cried blue murder. She claimed I had attacked her, though I had danced away and watched her from the stones.
They dragged me before Grayson. I, a small white thing, stood with my tail high.
"You did no wrong," I thought. "She may be playing for a throne."
"She says you scratched her," the head chamberlain said, while the court watched like a flock of small birds.
"She was attacked by stray cats," I wanted to mew. "She fumbled at them and cried like an offended porcelain doll."
"I will decide," Grayson said, and his voice folded like shutters. "No one hurts you in my house and goes unexamined."
He had me escorted to the inner courts, and strangers looked at me as if I were a token.
"Meow," I said for show, and purred, and Grayson allowed himself a small, private indulgence. "You cannot make me a scapegoat."
The next day Grayson had his own brand of justice. Eliza had connections—she did not protest. Later I learned she had been beaten in a private ceremony to mark a sliver of mischief; the blow was not merely correction but public display. They called it a "punishment for the sake of propriety." I saw her face when the lashes struck: surprise, rage, humiliation.
Her cries echoed.
"She is delicate!" some whispered. "Too delicate. She collapsed!"
"She plotted," Grayson said. "She made a show."
I watched the entire aftermath with cat eyes. Eliza's expression changed as the punishment unfolded—at first proud and incredulous, then confusion, then a smear of fear, denial, then collapse. Court women closed their fans and gossiped. Men took out their tablets of rumor and transcribed.
But that public humiliation was only the first chapter. Because secrets in that palace have weight, and birds carry them on wings. The more the palace watched, the deeper their interest dug.
Weeks later, the palace found that the court, troublingly, harbored a darker plan: an attempted coup. I had sniffed the air and felt a rot like old fruit. I had followed shadows and heard men speak in low voices. I had seen a dark-haired man—Earl Flynn—greeting a crooked old man with a hood named Cormac Schreiber. They spoke a name that made my whiskers buzz: they would move at midnight and set fire and take the throne.
I wanted to tell Grayson. But how? I was only a cat by habit and a person by accident in my heart. I had not yet chosen a human face, nor had I the courage to come into such a matter cleanly. I watched and listened and kept to the nights.
On the night of the plan, I did a foolish thing. Invisible spells and petty tricks are my tools, but I had exhausted most of my charms by then. It rained like the world had split. The conspirators moved early. Arrows flew before the proper hour, and men in black poured into the streets.
"Assassin!" someone screamed.
"Traitors!" someone else called, and then I felt a blade slip past my side like ice wind. I climbed, I leapt, and there he was—Grayson pressed against the carriage, holding me like a small white heart. He moved like a storm—fast, precise, terrible. He drew steel and threw it.
One of the men in the crowd raised a shining bar. Then the world pulsed red. Blood painted my fur. For a moment, I did not know that human blood was warm and thick and that the taste of it could burn the ways a cat remembers. I had sworn never to take such a thing; my mother had whispered of the danger of blood for our kind.
"Don't drink it," I told myself, but I could not be entirely steady. Grayson lifted me into his arms and turned to face the night. He was bleeding, an arrow through the shoulder, but his hand was steady. He rescued me because I had been his warmth in cold nights; he rescued me because I had been foolish enough to show him affection and to promise him a little of my strange luck.
"Go," he said, pressing me to his chest. "Go, little one."
"I won't," I said, though I had meant him to run. I latched my magic to his wound and wrapped an odd, amateur enchantment around his pulse. It was all I had. It slowed the heat and made his breath less ragged. It was not much, but it worked.
We ran together. We dove into an old empty palace, into a dried well that once had been a river. We hid there. In the cramped coolness he stared at me as if seeing me anew.
"You can speak," he breathed. "You can—"
"I was always a talker," I muttered, trying to sound offended but failing when he lifted me into his lap and wrapped his robe around me to keep me warm.
"I thought you were only a cat," he whispered. "But you—" His face lost its commander when he looked at me; something softer took over. "You saved me."
"I did what was useful," I said, and I nuzzled his wrist. I tasted purple air on his skin; it steadied me. I had become human in the chaos—something inside me cracked and the form I had for centuries flickered into taking shape. My legs lengthened, my hands appeared, and I shrieked; it was both terrifying and glorious.
He watched me turn, stunned, as if a moon had shifted in the sky.
"You're—" he began.
"Don't say anything stupid," I snapped, still halfway between purr and human breath. "We should go. Get patched. Hide."
We accomplished such things. He was wounded but not dead. I left my cat self in a closet of muscle memory and became a girl. He slept for three days. I nursed him with the last herbs I could borrow and my own stolen breath.
And that was the point my life changed entirely. I could have left that night. I could have run to the hills to find my parents, Ruben and Marina, and lived the rest of my years sleeping on warm rocks and feasting on moonlit dew. But a part of me—call it vanity, call it affection—did not.
"Stay," Grayson said as he grew more whole. "Be here."
"Why would I?" I asked.
"Because the palace fits you like a hand," he said. "Because I like you. Because—" He swallowed. "Because I need you."
I pretended not to notice how his tongue clicked on the words, then I made a bargain. "Two hundred years' worth of small fish in return," I said.
"Deal," he answered, and took my hand half-joking, half-pleading.
Time passed, and I learned more than I expected. I learned that power consoles itself in strange ways. I learned the sly webs of court, and the soft cruelty of those who think they must win at any cost. I learned Eliza Cardoso had not simply snapped out of place because she had been stung; she was a player in a larger game. She wanted to sit at a throne. She and the queen mother had designs and favors and debts owed that could be repaid with a marriage.
"She tried to use me," I told Grayson over a bowl of warm porridge in the early spring. "She put mint in her sleeves and called the cats like an offering."
"And you—"
"I ate well," I admitted. "I did not scratch her. She traded a narrative, and the court believed her."
He laughed, soft and slight. "They believe many things."
It would be too neat to say the end came quietly. It did not. It came like a parade of rotten fruit, and many things were thrown. The conspirators struck, and Grayson caught them. They were not all killed; some tried to flee, some surrendered, and some—like Eliza—were dragged under the exacting eye of law.
The punishment of Eliza Cardoso became a public lesson painted in detail across the capital. They did not simply exile her. They did not simply scold her in private. The punishment was a ritual designed to reverse her performance of innocence in front of the whole court.
The morning was bright. Crowds pressed into the square outside the Hall of Records, and a ceremonial platform had been constructed under the great flags. Grayson sat upon a lower dais, a strip of velvet separating him from his throne. He looked like a winter sky—blue, cold, and impossible. Eliza was brought forward in plain, somber robes. The wind tugged at the edges of her sleeves.
"Why are you doing this?" she cried first, voice a practiced tremor.
"It is because you thought to use soft hands to steal a heart and a crown," Grayson said. "It is because you lied to protect yourself and hurt others."
The chamberlain read the list of charges in a voice that made the crowd lean in.
"You invited the palace cats with drugged herbs so that you might create spectacle. You conspired with the queen mother to sway the mind of a ruler. You planned to win favor with deceit. You broke the sanctity of our court."
Her face went through an array of changes that I now knew well: the first flash—calculated outrage—then confusion as the facts met her, denial and the slow, off-key melody of real desperation.
"All of this is false!" she screamed. "I would never—"
"You brought this on yourself," the crowd murmured. Hands folded behind fans. Some whispered with pleasure. Other faces were stone.
"Today," Grayson said, "the court will see how truth and deception look when laid bare."
What came after was designed to be a mirror. In a performance that lasted for hours, witnessed by the ministers, guards, and hundreds of common folk, Eliza was made to recount everything she had done. Each claim she made was met with evidence—letters, fragrant pouches, witness statements. Old servants stepped forward who had seen her coat pockets stuffed with mint and catnip, who had traded snatches of her laughter for coins.
"Do you still deny it?" Grayson asked, voice steady as a blade.
"No," she choked. Pride collapsed like a folding screen when its hinges are eaten by rot. She moved from outrageous to furious. Her face hardened; eyes went glass-slick. She tried to stand proud, tried to twist her narrative into something noble. The crowd hissed. Fingers pointed. A few called for her to confess.
"Confess," a woman in the front row urged, voice raw with judgment. "Admit it."
Eliza's posture bent like an oak struck by ice. "I—" she began, then faltered. Denial unspooled into a frantic attempt to bargain. "I was afraid. I wanted to help my family."
"Your family?" a minister scoffed. "You used the court."
Her hands shook. Tears appeared, not like the first false ones but the real sort that rose from a well of shame. I could hear murmurs ripple through the watching crowd—some pitied her, others spat contempt.
"Tell them how you planned it," Grayson said.
She told them, and as she told the tale the room changed colors. The gallows of her own deception were built in the open square. Men and women who had once bowed now stared as the moral weight of the lie crushed what pride she had left.
When they finally pronounced sentence, it included public labor, restitution paid to the people she had wronged, and a stripping of titles. The crowd clapped in a way that felt like thunder. Eliza's face drained; she made a sound like something breaking.
As they led her away, there was a moment where she looked up—toward the balcony where I sat, now in a body that was more than fur. Her gaze found me, blade-like and accusing.
"You are the reason I was discovered," she whispered across the din. "You animal—"
"Meow," I said. Then I added, in a voice she heard perfectly: "You brought it on yourself."
Her reaction to that was precisely human—a spike of humiliation, then rage. She beat on the guards who held her, then she collapsed into frantic wails. The crowd cheered as if witnessing the fall of a moon.
That scene, more than any lash or mark, was the punishment that echoed in the market and in the tea houses. People would repeat the details of her humiliation for years, and each retelling added a little more shame to her name.
But the punishments did not end with her. Earl Flynn and Cormac Schreiber—the planners of the coup—were exposed by interrogation, and their sentences were crafted to fit their crimes. Earl Flynn had once believed himself untouchable; he sat in the stocks with his pride gone, forced to watch as his plans were unpacked and displayed. His voice crumpled from defiant roaring to a low, pleading whine as his allies turned and the crowd recorded it. Cormac tried to whisper invocations that had worked on others, but witnesses came forward with testimonies of his manipulations and bargains.
When the court finally closed the book on them, the public spectacle did not merely humiliate the offenders. It allowed the people to witness the unmaking of treason—a lesson made human and loud. Everyone in the square had a role in the punishment: some cheered, some threw rotten fruit, some stood in silence feeling old loyalties shift. The faces of the conspirators, which had once been smug, cracked into a thousand fractures.
It is easy to relish a bad end when one is safe. I will not pretend I did not enjoy it; I did. But I also felt a strange cold watching a woman like Eliza, so perfectly arranged, so practiced in turning hearts, fall apart. She had aimed for a crown and found a ruin.
After all of that, life changed. The palace, which had been a place of whisper and threat, became quiet in a way that meant order was restored. I became more than a pet; I became an intimate the ruler could not quite name, and that was power. People who had once dared to speak ill of me were silent. Those who had made me a cautionary tale went home and looked at their napkins in a different way.
"Are you going to abandon me now that you know I am not only a cat?" I asked Grayson one night when he stroked my hair like a thin cloud.
"Never," he answered, and when he said it I felt the world tilt in a new direction. "You are mine in a way I did not plan. I will not let the court touch you after this."
Years passed. I learned the language of silk and policy, the cruel sinew beneath ceremony. I fed on small pleasures—a bowl of fish that tasted like coronets, a bootlicked floor, the way Grayson would watch me when I was asleep. People in the markets pointed and whispered, "There goes the Emperor's pet," and sometimes they would cross themselves because they believed the stories would turn their luck.
We grew together as the oddest pair anyone had seen: a ruler who said terrible things about himself and a small white woman who would scratch anyone with bad intentions. We made a life that was messy and tender. I learned that power is less about forcing the world into your shape than about shaping yourself around the people you mean to keep. Grayson, for all his thorns and steel, found something in me that calmed the old storm in his chest; I, for all my trickery and appetite, found a place that fed me more than mountains ever could.
There were more trials, as there always are. Old enemies came and went. My parents, Ruben Cash and Marina Greco, visited and argued like two halves of an unfinished song. My father, forever cheerful and clumsy, cried the day I told him I would not return to the wild mountains to stay forever. He said, "Then I will come to see you eat a thousand small fish," and I believed him because he meant it.
The court learned to be gentler as a habit, though never soft. Some men and women never forgave us our closeness. Others, like the chamberlain who had once shouted about seals and pens, became fiercely protective in ways only the court could disguise as propriety.
We married, eventually, in a way that was both modest and extravagant: a small ceremony in private, followed by a great feast. People said Grandiosity and claimed we had turned the empire upside down. I said, "We both enjoyed the fish," and he kissed my forehead.
"What will you be called?" he asked, when it mattered, in the hush before guests.
"Call me what you like," I said, and then decided, "Call me your queen."
He laughed as if he'd been given the sun. He said, "My Queen Miriam," and meant it. The world blinked.
It is not an heroic epic. It is the story of small wants magnified into a life: a cat who chose human shape for comfort, a man who ruled and learned to be ruled by softness, a court that learned to swallow its poison and cough up something better. We had arguments and reconciliations, jealous nights and moments of quiet, a thousand tiny domestic battles that made us more than the sum of our titles.
"Do you regret being a cat?" he asked me sometimes when he worried about enemies.
"Only when I step on your foot," I said, and he would laugh.
"Would you have left without me?" he asked once, voice low.
"Would I have left without you?" I countered. "Do you know what a mountain looks like in the snow?"
He did not. He had seen plains of paper and the towers of law, not the quiet of high wind and stone. We taught each other things we had no maps for.
In the end, I never became ordinary. I never wanted to. I kept my appetite for mischief and my tender smallness. I kept my knack for finding trouble and turning it into warmth. Grayson kept his armor and his careful strategies. The world around us adjusted like a clock that had been wound too tight—then less tightly—and then it lived.
Once, in a rare moment of brashness, I turned to him and said, "You call me replacement. You called me a stand-in for someone you thought you had lost."
He looked at me as if the room had fallen away. "You are not a stand-in," he said. "You are the one I woke to."
We built from those words a life that had no mirror but the truth between two people who had learned how to give and take.
As for those who plotted to unsettle us, they learned that cruelty and calculation are brittle. The world has ways to make the false crumble in public, and I tasted that justice not as triumph but as a cautionary tale for all who thought power could be cornered without consequence.
Now, when I walk through the garden and my bell rings soft against my collar, people bow and call out greetings. Children throw me bits of fish on market days, and servants slide me scraps in smiles. I am pampered, yes—but I earned every scrap by the breath I saved and the tricks I learned.
"Are you the Emperor's little cat?" they ask, delighted at the story.
"Yes," I say with a smugness that will not die. "And he's mine."
I curl against him. He brushes my hair with fingers that still know how to rule and knead and correct; his steady warmth is as much a guard as an army ever was. We sleep, sometimes in peace, sometimes with the knowledge that tomorrow will bring new petitions and new gossip.
"Promise me you won't change," he murmurs into my hair.
"I would if I could," I reply, "but I'd rather stay. For two hundred years, at least."
He laughs. I purr.
The palace has many stories—some cruel, some comic, some tender. Mine is small, loud, and soft all at once. It begins with a bag and a stolen rat and spirals into a life with a man who rules and a woman who purrs.
I am Miriam Camacho. I was once only a cat. Now I am the one who keeps the Empire warm.
The End
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