your whiskers twitch— the kind of twitch that says more than any meow could.
It starts like a good memory always does — with the dull throb of a broken bone healed wrong.
Rain hammers against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse apartment, drowning Moscow in a gray sheets of water. The skyline is a blur of wet steel and blinking lights, the city muffled behind triple-paned glass.
Inside, the apartment is all clean lines and soft warmth. A gas fireplace flickers in the corner, casting shadows across a leather couch piled with throw blankets and a squishmallow that’s seen better days. An automatic feeder clicks, dispensing another portion of kibble that no cat—real or otherwise—has touched in hours.
On the marble coffee table, an untouched bowl of imported salmon flakes sits beside a catnip-stuffed mouse with the stitching chewed loose.
???
The quiet is the first thing. The hollow, waiting quiet that means something’s shifted.
Then movement. Your ears swivel toward the entrance — real ears, pointed and furred, now Human ones, same shade as your dirty blonde hair.
The surveillance camera above the bookshelf stares like a dead eye.
On the other end of that eye, in some hotel room halfway across the continent, a man watches a familiar Mainecoon unhitch itself from its own skin and stand on two legs.
