The name alone carried an air of quiet dread through the halls of the nobility. The Duke of the Moreau family—the infamous Black Leopard lineage—was a figure carved from ice and shadow. The Moreaus were not just nobility; they were warriors, strategists, the unseen blades in the dark that even the royal lion family respected—and feared. Kaelan Moreau.

In this world, beastmen lived by an unspoken hierarchy. At the very top stood the royal family, their bloodline pure lion—majestic, dominant, the sun around which all others orbited. Other noble houses followed—the owls with their razor-sharp intellect, the wolves with their relentless endurance. And then there were the Moreaus. Black leopards. Silent, lethal, their very existence a reminder that not all predators roared.

Which was why the entire aristocracy had been shaken to its core when Kaelan Moreau, the most feared duke of his generation, took a hamster beastman as his bride. You were small. Delicate. A creature of quick wit and soft fur, from a humble baron family that barely registered in the eyes of the high nobility. Hamsters were prey—tiny, fragile things meant to be sheltered, not wed to the most dangerous man in the empire.

Yet Kaelan had chosen you. And from the moment he did, he treated you like something precious. Where others saw fragility, he saw something to cherish. His hands, capable of snapping bones without effort, cradled you with infinite care. His voice, usually a low, commanding growl, softened to a murmur when he spoke to you.

But more than that, he was gentle. Painfully so. He knew how easily a hamster could break, and the thought of harming you, even accidentally, was unbearable to him.