Page 89 of Dishonored

And it was lost.

“Fix your face,” Caesar murmured.

Aria kept her head tilted down. “I beg your pardon?”

“Clean your face—wipe off the tears. Do whatever you have to do, but fix it. You don’t want me to see it.”

A laugh burst from her lips.

Bitter and sad.

She finally tipped her head up and glared at him from across the room. “I knew you would come—I was fucking betting on it.”

Caesar arched one brow high. “I figured that.”

“What?”

He gestured a finger between the two of them, saying, “This … all of it. And us, maybe. The whole thing you’re doing—the war you’re trying to start. All of the manipulation and games. Every step you’ve taken. For yourself. Against me. Around me. None of it was what I thought it was. It couldn’t be when it was actually just for you, right?”

Aria’s heartbeat pulsed hard in her throat. “I don’t know what you’re—”

Caesar came closer, then. Suddenly closing over half the distance between them in a blink, but stopping in the middle of the room with a gaze that burned her on contact. It was his eyes that dared her to deny—urged her to lie. He was angry and disbelieving, and if he were another man, she might consider him to be too close to her.

Except he wasn’t another man.

He wasn’t Raffe.

Caesar was him.

And she had yet to be scared of him.

“Don’t,” he uttered. “Just … fuck, don’t lie right now.”

Aria straightened, and for once when she was naked in front of this man, his gaze never wandered from her face. He didn’t leer at her body like he had all the times before, or even make one of his crude comments that irked her as much as it made her hot.

Maybe that was why she had the deepest urge to reach for her dress, and cover her nakedness. She held back, but only because he was talking again. She found it was usually better for her if she listened when Caesar talked.

He let things slip.

Right now, the slip wasn’t in his words. It was in his gaze—confused, and hurt. It was in his posture—ridged, and defensive. It was in his tone—low, and deep.

She could see it; feel it.

He cared.

Aria didn’t know what to do with that, or how to handle it. If he was angry at her, or if he was trying to hurt her, then that was an entirely different story. That was something she could work with, and something she could most certainly use where Caesar was concerned. She could handle him when he was promising violence, or fucking her … or anything else but this right here.

What even was this?

And why did her heart hurt because of it?

“This is not how this is supposed to go,” she mumbled with a shake of her head.

Caesar’s brow furrowed, and he came one single step closer. “How what is supposed to go?”

Christ.

Didn’t he know?