[KAEL — POV]
The door came off its hinges with the sound of something absolute ending.
Three of them. He catalogued this in the fraction of a second it took them to fill the frame: three operatives, body armor, weapons configured for close-quarters elimination. Professional. Coordinated. Not the fumbling zealotry of ideological extremists but the practiced efficiency of soldiers who had done this before.
The Corvath he'd encountered in Order intelligence files were supposed to be amateurs with conviction. These were not amateurs.
He was already moving when the first one cleared the threshold—not toward the door but laterally, using the broken table as cover and the shadow of the room as a second cover, because the lamp he'd lit earlier was in the corner and his back was to the unlit ha
