“And what were you going to do to me?”

“As I said, you’re going to serve our purpose. If I was going to harm you, you’d already be harmed.”

Moving as swiftly as she can command her limbs, Lexi raises her arm and brings the makeshift weapon down toward his chest.

Daian reaches up and easily captures her wrist before the strike completes half its arc. He twists her arm to one side, painfully, causing the dagger’s handle to slip from her fingers and wringing a short yelp from her. He presses the tip of his blade beneath her chin, lightly, not hard enough to pierce her flesh yet firmly enough to give her pause.

“Lexi, please,” he chastises her, like a child. “You keep your steel on the inside. That’s the steel that’s dangerous under your command. You’re a different kind of warrior, not one made for the battlefield. Violence does not become—”

The rest of his words are mangled by growls as Lexi leans away from his blade and rams the hardest portion of her skull into his nose. Bones break beneath the blow and blood pours over his lips. The tears that involuntarily well up in his eyes sting and blind him. Lexi tears her wrist from his grip and takes off running across the parlor, knowing that if she can make it through the front doors and out into the cooperative he won’t be able to touch her. She doesn’t look back to see if he’s on her heels, she only runs, dashing over the bodies of Nils and Jindo and practically leaping from the parlor into the tower’s entrance hall.

The front doors are only a few yards in front of her, and Lexi sprints faster to reach them, extending an arm toward the nearest rung. She’s ready to close her fist around it and tear the doors open when they seem to be physically pulled away from her. The doors become a distant sight sinking farther and farther away in her field of vision and Lexi realizes she’s no longer running; she’s falling. Whatever just slammed into the back of her head has also turned the world upside-down and caused Lexi’s entire body to go numb.

A moment before she loses consciousness, Lexi sees Daian’s dagger lying where it landed after he threw the weapon at her, on the floor in front of her face. The pommel that struck the soft back of her skull is now decorated with a smear of her blood to which several strands of her hair have stuck.

Lexi wonders, briefly, if he truly meant to hit her with that end of the dagger, but the only answer to her question that presents itself is darkness.

MISSIO INTERRUPTUS