He was shaking because for the first time since the Empress fell, he had chosen not to kill. And the mark on his hand had gone quiet, as if even the Outsider was watching to see what he would do next.
He could kill them. The Outsider’s mark itched. One swift possession into the guard outside. One Bend Time to freeze the twins mid-laugh. Their throats would open like red flowers, and no one would ever know.
He wasn’t. Not from cold. Not from fear.
Emily squeezed his neck. “You’re shaking,” she said. dishonored 1
He Blinked across the courtyard, landing without a sound on a wrought-iron balcony. Inside, a guest was arguing with a courtesan. Corvo pressed his face to the glass. The man’s throat was bare. His coin purse was fat. It would be so easy to slide a blade between his ribs.
Corvo’s grip tightened on his folding blade.
The rain over Dunwall had not let up for forty days. It fell in greasy sheets, washing blood and whale oil into the Wrenhaven River. Corvo Attano knelt in the shadow of a copper gargoyle, his masked face tilted toward the lamp-lit windows of the Golden Cat. Behind him, the city groaned—a dying beast choked by plague and the Lord Regent’s iron fist. He was shaking because for the first time
She pulled back, eyes wide. “Can we kill them? The bad men?”
“Corvo,” she whispered, her face buried in his coat. She was trembling. She smelled of cheap perfume and fear. “I knew you’d come.”
A chokehold. A quiet drag. Two unconscious bodies slumped behind a velvet curtain. He picked the lock on Emily’s door with a hairpin, and when the hinges creaked open, a small figure launched herself at his legs. The Outsider’s mark itched
He slipped through a service hatch, crawled through ducts slick with grime, and dropped into the private chambers of the Pendleton twins—the men who held Emily captive as leverage. They were drunk, arrogant, their faces painted like porcelain masks. One was detailing, with a laugh, how he planned to “train” the young empress.
The mark on Corvo’s left hand still ached—a black, angular brand that smelled of ancient stone and void. It had given him powers he did not ask for: the ability to stop time, to possess the bodies of rats and men, to blink across rooftops like a thrown knife. Each power was a temptation. Each use a whisper that there were no clean hands in this fight.
Tonight, he was not here to tempt fate. He was here to save a princess.