Page 49 of Dishonored

Caesar sneered at the sight of Aria’s widening gaze, adding, “So, yeah, tell me again how I won’t fucking ruin you because you’re just a woman, and you haven’t hurt me. I don’t need you to make something hurt for me to justify being a fucking asshole—I just am. I don’t ever justify anything I do. That would mean I actually give a shit.”

She tried to speak.

Tried to find something to say.

“I …”

Caesar nodded, and took one step back. “And don’t forget it, either.”

She refused to let this man knock her off balance for too long, though. She wouldn’t be a De Rose if she wasn’t resilient, and able to quickly bounce back from anything that was thrown her damn way.

If she couldn’t appeal to his empathetic nature—if he even had the capability to feel empathy for someone else—then she would try a different direction. Whatever it took to get this done, then she would do it.

“Perhaps, I could help you, then,” she suggested.

Caesar tipped his head back, and stared down at her unaffected. “There’s nothing you have or could do that I need or want, actually. There’s nothing you can give me.”

“Maybe not directly. I need you to step back and let me do whatever it is I have to do, and will do to get control of this city. Including your family—your father. It’s what needs to happen, or … in the effort to gaining control, I will get what I want in another way. You could get something you want out of that, couldn’t you?”

“To what, kill my father?”

Aria smiled at lilt in his tone. “Is that what you need and want, Caesar? For your father to be out of the picture for good?”

He said nothing.

His eyes gave away nothing.

He was cold all over.

“Give me what I want,” Aria said, “and maybe in a roundabout way, you will be able to get what you want, too.”

“I still don’t know what that is—what you want, I mean.”

“Isn’t it obvious? Power.”

Because the power to control and manipulate would give her everything else. She only needed to get there first, and she was running out of time to do it.

Caesar came close again—no warning, just all in her space and coloring her vision with him entirely. His head bent down, and hers tipped upward. She wouldn’t be able to move a millimeter without kissing him, but she held back.

“I don’t think that’s all it is, though,” he murmured, “and that’s where I start to get concerned. You can’t trust someone who doesn’t give you all the details.”

“I—”

The click of the door unlatching before it was opened sent Aria stepping back from Caesar quickly even though she knew it couldn’t be anyone that might catch her doing something wrong. And it wasn’t.

Nico stood in the doorway, and his gaze only drifted to her when he said, “Raffe is going to call in ten—he’s on his way back to the hotel from another meet with the smugglers.”

Aria nodded. “Okay, grazie, Nico.”

She looked back to Caesar once the door was closed, and swore he hadn’t once stopped staring at her through the entire exchange. She hadn’t given anything away—she couldn’t have, not about her husband, or how he made her feel the worst kind of dread and shame all at once.

And yet, he looked at her like he knew something …

“You’re going to have to leave now,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find a way home, Caesar. Have a good night.”

“I need to find a way to get control of him, or have him work to my benefit,” Aria said, voicing the thoughts that had been troubling her for well over an hour.

Nico glanced at the phone resting on her lap that was now turned off. “Raffe?”