Emily squeezed his neck. “You’re shaking,” she said.

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 carried her through the window, Blinking across the rooftops as the rain washed the city’s sins into the sea. Behind them, the Golden Cat glittered like a poisoned jewel. Ahead, the Hound Pits Pub waited—a den of conspirators with their own hidden blades.

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.

But the Outsider had other plans.

“Not tonight,” he said softly. “Tonight, we just leave.”

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.