Page 90 of Dishonored

She waved her hands between them, knowing damn well she probably looked crazy, but not giving a single fuck about it. “This! You can’t care, Caesar—you don’t get to care! You get to be angry, and … unpredictable. I know how to fight back against that. I know how to—”

“Use it,” he interrupted softly.

Aria stiffened all over, but stayed quiet.

Caesar nodded like he didn’t need her to say a thing. “Oh, yeah, I do know now. That’s what you use, girl. Sure, you make it seem like the person is doing it because it’ll help them by hurting you, but that’s never what it is, is it? Your father, for one. Tell me different.”

She refused to look at him.

Caesar only sighed.

She heard his next step, though. Another move that yet again, brought him closer to her. A part of her wanted him to get the hell out of her room, and then maybe she could salvage her pride; fix her fucking plans. Another part of her found it strangely easy to be around this man, and wanted to keep him near.

God.

What was wrong with her?

“I can’t …”

“What?” Caesar asked.

“I can’t like you,” Aria said under her breath. “It messes with everything. Don’t make me like you, Caesar.”

His laughter came out like raw honey.

Dark, rich, and all too sweet.

“That’s amusing,” he countered, “considering everyone around me seems to think I’m rather easy to hate.”

“You are.”

And he wasn’t at the same time.

“Aria,” he murmured, “would you look at me?”

She did, but the same thing stared back at her. A man who both confused and infuriated her. A man she had been able to trust in—because he would continue to do the same thing over and over again without even knowing he would help her in doing so. A man who turned her on as much as he drove her crazy.

A man who cared.

He shouldn’t care.

There was a hell of a lot less than half a room of space between them now, but he quickly closed it. She couldn’t breathe nearly as well when all she could smell was his distinct scent, or see only his gaze locked on hers and nothing else. His hand came up, and his palm curved around the side of her throat, and part of her jaw.

She would have flinched.

Except he wasn’t Raffe.

“You could have asked me not to touch your throat,” he said gently. “I would have—”

“I like it when you do that. I don’t like it when he does it.”

Caesar nodded subtly. “You don’t love him at all, do you?”

“I was given to him. I never chose him. There was no choice. I gave my father everything, and was all the things he wanted me to be. And yet, this is what he did to me in the end. This was who he gave me to.”

“Why not just kill your husband, then?” Caesar asked. “You can’t say you’re incapable. I have seen you at work. You are more than able to get that done.”

Aria smiled a bit. “It would be easy, actually. I have a knife in my nightstand. I think about killing him every night he sleeps beside me.”