Tymber Dalton - Cardinal's Rule

He leaned forward. “I never would have abandoned you, slave. I wasn’t perfect. I admitted my short-comings and owned up to them. But you left me the first time, not the other way around. I always made sure I took care of you as best I could. For you to abandon someone like that, especially someone emotionally fragile and dependent upon you…” He shook his head as he sat back. “You’re lucky I didn’t kick you out, naked, the second I found out. It’s inexcusable. It doesn’t matter how honorable your intentions.”

Master said nothing the slave hadn’t said to himself countless times over the years. But once he’d done it, it had been too late to take it back even though he knew as he flew from Florida to California that final time that he’d probably made the worst mistake of his life.

It couldn’t be undone.

He’d severed his ties, left her set up financially, and prayed Ross and Loren would help her emotionally pick up the pieces.

Prayed she was strong enough to make it through her grief, as he suspected she was.

He’d scoured the local papers online for weeks after, the obituaries, praying he didn’t find her name. He didn’t dare risk contacting her, afraid it would only make things worse for her…or make him turn around and abandon his Master to return to her. A long, drawn-out good-bye would have been worse for her. Not to mention Ross and Loren would likely want to kill him, and he didn’t need their anger at him to detract from them caring for Tilly.

So he kept his focus on his Master’s recovery, rounds of surgery and treatment and doctors visits, and focused on fighting to save his life and not think about her. After a while, the only time he allowed himself to take his focus off his Master was looking at her pictures on occasion. That, and praying she healed and lived a good life without him.

Praying every day she would one day forgive him, even if she despised him.

He never stopped loving her, or missing her.

“And how do you think it made me feel, hmm?” he continued. “Just some charity case. You didn’t respect me enough as a person, much less as your Master, to let me know the truth. Were you expecting me to die and hoping to inherit it all?”

“No, Master. I just wanted to take care of you.”

“You felt sorry for me, though, didn’t you?”

“They said you might be dying. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“But it was okay to abandon her and leave her alone? What gave you the right to decide that for her, Master or not? How does it feel being relegated to nothing more than a piece of meat? Do you like it? Because I want you to feel what you’ve done to the people in your life, slave. I want you to walk a mile in their shoes. I want you to totally comprehend how badly you fucked up by making assumptions and decisions for people without their input. Every action has a consequence.” He stared at him. “Go get dressed. Jeans, button-up shirt. Keep your collar on.”

Before the revelation, Master never made him wear his formal collar in public in vanilla settings. Now, it remained on him all the time except in the shower or when they went to the office.

Before, they tended to have a give-and-take relationship, even as Master and slave. Landry was always fair and consistent.

Before.

Now, Master treated him in a way he’d never treated him before, either during their first time together or since their reunion. Now the slave was little more than a piece of fuckable meat, there solely for his Master’s service and pleasure.

The slave felt he deserved it.

Tilly hung up with Loren. Her friend assured her she hadn’t had a fight with Ross, but still, there was something going on that Tilly couldn’t put her finger on. Ever since the other night at the club, her friends had acted on edge.

Loren was always her safe call for new clients. Clients she’d had for a while, she trusted. Just in case, Loren had access to her private online Google calendar with full contact details and descriptions of her clients.

All clients were told this up front.

Just in case.

Landry would arrive with his slave in twenty minutes. She’d already had two other sessions that morning, regulars, nothing tiring for her. The first, a middle-aged, overweight sissy who enjoyed being made to walk around in high heels and a French maid uniform while he cleaned her house with a butt plug up his ass. The other enjoyed being pelted with humiliating comments about his small cock, which in reality was fairly average, while she used him as a human footrest or coffee table.

Booooring.

She staggered her pain slut clients throughout the week after she’d once tried to do three in one day and nearly threw out her shoulder using a riding crop on the last one.

Landry told her he wanted her to go full-out, assured her that slave’s pain tolerance was high even though not a pain pig. “He’s trained to take it,” Landry said. “I would not call him a no-limits slave, because I do have limits. I don’t wish to damage my property. He’ll take whatever you see fit within the confines of our agreed-upon boundaries.”

That could be interesting. Her evening before with Bob had been a nice change of pace, especially since it hadn’t ended with her using a riding crop on his ass just to make him take it.

Some of her clients wanted the pain. Some of them despised pain but wanted the obedience.

Bob was the latter.

And tonight…

She smiled. She felt like laughing. It’d been too damn long since she’d looked forward to anything.

The last thing she’d looked forward to…

She ended that thought.

It would be nice to have vanilla interactions with someone other than Loren and Ross.

There came that pesky hope again. God, she hated that.

For today’s initial evaluation she’d opted for a mix of comfort versus form. Jeans, because she could move in them and they offered her a greater layer of protection than a skirt in case something went bad. Four-inch ankle boots. Comfortable, yet adding to her height, and the heels were sturdy enough she could kick with them and use them as a weapon of self-defense. She could also run in them, if needed. Push-up bra, tank top, topped by an oversized, long-sleeved, black button-up shirt, open, with the cuffs rolled to her elbows. The shirt’s hem hung past her ass and concealed the stun gun she kept clipped to her waistband in the small of her back.

Another precaution with new clients. So far, she’d never needed it. Well, not defensively, at least. She had two clients that begged her to use it on them on a regular basis.

No jewelry today, especially no dangly earrings that could get caught or pulled.

She checked herself in the mirror one last time as she heard a car in the drive. Landry rang her doorbell one minute before five.

Maybe he figured he’d better not push the being really early thing.

She opened the door and studied Landry. His slave stood behind him, head hung, brown, shoulder-length hair obscuring his face. She led them into the foyer.

“Glad to see you didn’t change your mind, Mr. LaCroux. One thousand cash. Payable now.”

He smiled, never taking his green eyes off her, and handed her a bank envelope. She opened it and counted it in front of him, ten one hundred dollar bills that appeared to be genuine, then returned it to the envelope, folded it in half, and tucked it in her back pocket. “Thank you, Mr. LaCroux.”

“Don’t thank me yet, Mistress Cardinal. You haven’t worked with slave yet. And please, call me Landry.”

She ignored that last part. “Does slave have a name?”

“Slave.” He smiled. “It’s the only name he deserves.”

She led them inside and pointed to the couch. Then she turned, walked around the coffee table, and sat in a chair on the other side. As she did, slave had already dropped to his knees on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, forehead touching the carpet, facing his Master.