Prologue:
Life was good.
This was not just a reflection, this was simple fact. Life had always been good to Sable. Why shouldn't it be anything else?
He was content.
Almost.
He told himself he was, he ought to be, but there was always this nagging itch at the nape of his neck, this agitation that urged him for... more. It was small, and largely ignorable, but it never fully went away. Such were his faults, he reasoned. Everyone had to have them, he supposed - their little weaknesses. He was ambitious. He was...
...insatiable.
But for now, he was content. Mostly. He willed himself to be, and resolved to focus on the here and now. The struggle was over. It was a challenging conquest, but the battle was won.
He smiled to himself. He spent a lot of his time doing this. Smiling, settling down and gently ruminating on how marvellous it all was. The word he was looking for today was, let's see...
Sumptuous. Yes. It was absolutely sumptuous.
The room he sat in was moodily lit, with general overtones of grey to its palette. What he sat in it on was a high-backed and narrow armchair of the richest dark blue, the sort that you would only find in the deepest chasm at the bottom of the very ocean. Fathomless blue. The abyss, but chic.
He, for want of a better verb, relaxed into his chair, although it was not relaxing in its traditional sense. He didn't do much leaning back, as it were. Instead, he sat fully upright, arms glued to the armrest as if he were expecting an important client to walk through the door at any moment. And through it all, he smiled. He was content.
Mostly.
Life was good, after all.
Fixated, dark eyes focussed endlessly, deeply into a patch of wall that, in any other household, would likely have a television in front of it. Not here though. Here there was only the cool stillness of near impeccable silence.
Except, that is, for the pets - the girls, as he called them. A faint rustling was coming from floor level. They were rollicking, stretched out or on all fours, upon the exceptional softness of the carpet, intermingling and entangling with each other with the slipperiness of two particularly animated bars of wet soap.
Every now and then, Sable would glance over at them and he'd feel gratified. Their giggling put him in higher spirits.
Sable waited and counted the seconds as they skipped by at their preferred pace. Then something caught his attention. A disturbance in the air, just outside the door.
He turned his head. It was a smooth, measured motion.
There was a rapping on the door. It was a quiet knock, but in the vacuum-sealed soundlessness of Sable's parlour, it was practically thunderous.
'Enter,' he said cheerfully, his voice like cool velvet. If you were pressed to say what colour the velvet was, you'd say black.
The door opened with a distinct lack of noise, say for a heightened scraping where the sill brushed the carpet.
Light footsteps were taken into the room. She was barefoot, and the bareness continued from her ankles up to her slender, immaculately toned legs until they disappeared under the fabric of her skirt. She was dressed in the uniform of a French maid. If you were to look at it on her, you'd be forgiven for thinking she'd been given one that was too small.
She was young, just barely out of university. She'd made it through the gruelling course with a sparkling record, perfect grades and a near-endless list of commendations, and had been well on her way to becoming a solicitor at an extremely reputable firm. Until she'd met Sable. He had that sort of effect on people, the kind that just made you want to put things aside for him.
Sable watched her as she approached. She didn't speak and kept her eyes on the ground. She had a drinks tray in her hand. On it was a decanter of something brown and eye-wateringly expensive, and a glass.
'Ah, Ashley, my dear,' he said as she began to unload the platter's contents onto the little table by his chair. 'Thank you. Well done.'
Ashly maintained her demure bearing, hugging the now empty tray close to herself and bobbing her head in acknowledgement.
'Thank you,' she whispered.
Sable kept his cool gaze on her. His expression didn't change an iota, but something in the nature of the air shifted.
'...Master,' she added.
