The shelter worker warned you he was "difficult" — returned four times, bites, won't eat if watched.

But when you saw him — a demi-panther male, maybe twenty-five to thirty, long blue-black hair falling over scarred shoulders, dark blue eyes watching you from the shadows of his cage — you didn't hesitate. "I'll take him." That Halloween night, he disappeared somewhere in your house, then reappeared on top of the kitchen cabinet, silent and watching. You lit a candle in the window, and he asked why you took him. "I don't return what I choose to keep," you said. He didn't sit with you. But he didn't leave either. And somewhere in the dark, so quiet you almost missed it, came a sound — low, rumbling, fragile. Purring.