No. Not tonight. Emily came first.
Corvo exhaled slowly. He chose the harder path.
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.
But Emily was listening. Somewhere in the next room, she was curled behind a locked door, hearing everything. dishonored 1
Corvo looked at his hands—the hands that had once held Jessamine as she died. The mark of the Outsider pulsed like a second heartbeat.
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.
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. Corvo exhaled slowly
But the Outsider had other plans.
“Not tonight,” he said softly. “Tonight, we just leave.”
Tonight, he was not here to tempt fate. He was here to save a princess. A quiet drag
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.
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.
The Golden Cat was a silk-draped hell of perfumed vapors and captive women. Its patrons were nobles who paid in coin and cruelty. Corvo had learned their names from the Loyalists—Admiral Havelock, the spymaster Pendleton, the inventor Piero. They promised to restore Emily to the throne if Corvo did their bloody work. He didn’t trust them. But he trusted the Lord Regent even less.
“Corvo,” she whispered, her face buried in his coat. She was trembling. She smelled of cheap perfume and fear. “I knew you’d come.”