1 — Dishonored

“Corvo,” she whispered, her face buried in his coat. She was trembling. She smelled of cheap perfume and fear. “I knew you’d come.”

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.

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. 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.

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. “Corvo,” she whispered, her face buried in his coat

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.

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. “I knew you’d come

Corvo knew the truth the Loyalists had not yet learned: in Dunwall, mercy was a luxury. But so was vengeance. And he had not yet decided which one would cost him more.