1 My name is Sadie. I was in the middle of fastening the delicate strap of my stiletto in the foyer when a floating line of blood-red text sliced through the air right before my eyes. Is this doomed mother seriously going to the party? She’s walking right into the trap Derek set to pay off his gambling debts. The second she hits the expressway, her brakes will fail, and she’ll be crushed into scrap metal. My fingers froze against the leather buckle. What in the hell was this? Before my brain could fully register the shock, the air in front of me seemed to rupture. A deluge of glowing, translucent commentary began scrolling frantically across my field of vision like live chat on a screen. If she doesn’t die, how does the plot move forward? The moment she’s gone, Harrison completely loses his mind. And little Toby, losing his mom so young, grows up into an utterly twisted supervillain. Derek only came back to the States to steal Harrison’s core tech patents. He lured Sadie out to use her as leverage, which leads to the fatal crash. God, this woman is painfully blind. A cold knot tightened in my stomach. Derek was a degenerate gambler? Industrial espionage? A staged car crash? Honestly though, this whole tragedy is Harrison’s fault for being such an emotionally repressed coward! He’s the undisputed Sovereign of Beasts—a literal, apex-tier white snow leopard with lethal combat power—and he’s so terrified his wife will think he’s a freak that he refuses to reveal his true form! Right?! Sadie actually adores animals, but Harrison lied through his teeth, pretending to have a lethal fur allergy, which forced her to give away the stray calico cat she’d had for five years. Now they just spend every single day playing the brooding billionaire and the detached trophy wife. It’s ridiculous. The one I cry for is poor baby Toby. The little guy is half-beast, and because he can’t fully control his tiny ears and tail yet, his dad makes him wear long sleeves and bucket hats in the dead of summer. The poor kid is so insecure; he genuinely believes his own mother despises him. My heart aches for Toby. After Sadie dies, Derek torments him for years. Growing up starved of love, he eventually snaps as an adult and tries to burn the entire city to the ground. My hand, still clutching the Porsche key fob, began to tremble uncontrollably. Toby was my three-and-a-half-year-old son. Harrison was my husband of four years—a man with severe germaphobia, whose ties were always knotted immaculately to the collar, and who had established an ironclad rule that not a single stray hair of any species was permitted inside our home. He was… a snow leopard? A majestic, pure white snow leopard? And my son was a baby cub? I swallowed hard. What the text didn’t know—what no one knew—was that I didn’t just like animals. I was a hopeless, incurable addict for anything soft, fluffy, and four-legged. Four years ago, when Harrison turned pale and looked like he was suffocating at the mere sight of my sweet rescue cat, I had wept as I packed her things and drove her to my mother’s house. And now, the universe was casually informing me that the man sharing my bed every night was an enormous, gorgeous, living plush toy capable of burying me in fur? To hell with Derek’s welcome-back party. What kind of gutter trash was Derek to think he could take precedence over me burying my face in an oversized cat? I tossed the car keys onto the credenza with a clatter, kicked off the stilettos, ripped the silk scarf from my neck, and marched barefoot back toward the living room. The central air was humming, keeping the vast, minimalist space crisp and cool. Harrison was seated on the charcoal leather sofa, dressed in a bespoke slate-gray shirt, silver-rimmed glasses resting on his sharp nose. He was reviewing quarterly financial reports on his tablet, looking impossibly aristocratic, untouchable, and frigid. A few feet away on the imported wool rug, little Toby was quietly stacking wooden blocks by himself. Despite the sweltering July heat outside and the climate-controlled chill inside, the poor boy was bundled in a thick black bucket hat, pulled low, alongside a tight long-sleeve UV-block shirt and heavy trousers. Whenever I had asked Harrison why he swaddled the boy so aggressively, he would reply without looking up, “He has a delicate constitution and an underdeveloped immune system. A slight draft will make him ill.” At the time, though my heart had ached for Toby, the polite distance of our arranged marriage and Harrison’s uncompromising authority had kept me silent. I had bought his excuse. Now, seeing Toby’s flushed, sweaty little cheeks beneath the brim of that wretched hat, a sharp pang of fury and guilt pierced my chest. Immune deficiency my ass. He was hiding his ears and tail. “Haven’t you left yet?” Harrison asked, looking up at the sound of my bare footsteps. His gaze swept over my bare throat where the scarf had been, then traveled down to my bare feet on the hardwood. His brow knit together almost imperceptibly, his tone maintaining its customary, cool detachment. “Isn’t Derek waiting for you at the marina?” Normally, his aloof indifference would have provoked a sarcastic remark from me before I slammed the front door behind me. Instead, I stood there, staring intently at the crown of his dark hair, vividly picturing a pair of plush, snow-white feline ears popping through those styled strands. “I’m not going,” I said, walking over and dropping onto the sofa beside him. Harrison’s finger froze mid-swipe on the screen. “You’re not going?” He turned his head, a rare, fleeting flicker of bewilderment passing through his steel-gray eyes before it was replaced by guarded composure. “I thought he had something vital to give you.” “He’s a con artist,” I replied casually, picking an apple from the fruit bowl and taking a crisp bite. “I just found out he’s drowning in foreign gambling debts. The only reason he reached out was to kidnap me and extort a ransom out of you.” Harrison’s expression hardened instantly. The ambient temperature in the room plummeted. A lethal, terrifying glint flashed beneath his wire-rimmed lenses—a sheer, suffocating menace that belonged exclusively to an apex predator at the top of the food chain. Holy crap! The snow leopard is bristling! Harrison already sniffed out that Derek was dirty and had twelve undercover security details trailing Sadie’s car! This man is so stubborn. He’s hopelessly in love with his wife, gets violently jealous if another man even breathes in her direction, but insists on playing the untouchable CEO. The glowing text floated by, providing real-time commentary. I suppressed an eye roll, an overwhelming surge of curiosity bubbling beneath my ribs. Ignoring Harrison’s icy facade, I turned my gaze down toward the rug. Hearing my voice, Toby’s small frame trembled visibly. He shrank back toward the corner of the sofa, his tiny hands clutching the brim of his bucket hat in white-knuckled terror, his large, tear-bright eyes peering up at me with timid hesitation. “Mommy…” his voice was softer than a whisper, fragile and cracking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get the rug dirty…” Seeing him so terrified of offending me, so convinced he was an unwanted burden, made my throat tighten with an agonizing ache. What had I missed while playing the part of the distant, career-focused wife to match Harrison’s coldness? In this child’s world, suffocating inside layers of heavy fabric every day wasn’t just physical misery; it was the crushing psychological terror that his own mother would discover he was a monster. I stepped off the sofa and dropped into a crouch directly in front of him. “Toby, sweetheart, aren’t you hot?” I softened my voice to a gentle hum, reaching out to brush a damp strand of hair from his flushed temple. Toby was entirely unaccustomed to such warmth. His eyes widened like saucers, his tiny mouth parting in frozen shock, forgetting to breathe. Then, panicking, he shook his head furiously, tugging the hat further down over his brow. “N-No! Toby isn’t hot!” I let out a soft sigh. “Lying isn’t for good boys, honey. Your face is drenched in sweat. Let’s take off the hat and go wash up, okay?” I reached for the brim. “Sadie!” A sharp, thunderous shout cut through the room. Harrison surged to his feet, his tablet clattering heavily against the rug. He closed the distance between us with terrifying, inhuman speed, his hand clamping around my wrist. His grip was ironclad, the heat radiating from his palm unnaturally searing. “Don’t touch him,” Harrison’s voice was strained, the legendary composure that commanded boardrooms cracking to reveal a raw, desperate panic. “He… he has a severe viral rash on his scalp. It’s highly contagious. Keep your hands away.” Lie. Keep digging that hole, Harrison. I wrenched my wrist from his grip, standing up to look him dead in the eye. “A rash? What kind of rash is contagious through a hat?” I stepped into his personal space, challenging him. “Harrison, I am his biological mother. If my son is sick, I’m not allowed to look at him?” Harrison’s throat worked, his jawline locked tight enough to shatter bone. “We have private pediatricians on retainer,” he said, looking away, his voice stiff with an authority that was visibly crumbling. “Just don’t touch him.” Look at the poor dad panicking! This is the hardest phase of half-beast maturation to control. The second that hat comes off, a pair of leopard ears is going to spring right out! Harrison is terrified out of his mind. Beastkind has always been ostracized in human society. He’s convinced Sadie will be utterly disgusted and walk out on them forever. Reading the text and looking at Harrison’s tense, cornered expression, I felt an unexpected wave of tenderness. For all his billions and absolute power, this man was terrified of losing his family. Which made it all the more necessary to rip the band-aid off right now. “I’m looking,” I declared. Without giving him time to react, I dropped low, darting past his outstretched arm. “Let Mommy see this rash, Toby!” “Sadie, no!” Harrison gasped, reaching out, but he was a fraction of a second too late. I caught the brim of Toby’s bucket hat and yanked it straight upward. A soft, muffled sound broke the silence, like spring-loaded velvet finally snapping free from confinement. The air in the room froze. Rising proudly from Toby’s silky dark hair were two rounded, pure white ears, tipped with exquisite silver-gray leopard rosettes. As the boy’s chest heaved with rapid breaths, the velvety ears gave two incredibly sharp, instinctive twitches. Holy. Mother. Of. God. It was the most adorable thing I had ever seen in my life.
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