[KAEL — POV]
He read her note in the river house.
Twelve years ago. My sister was killed.
He sat with it for a while.
Twelve years. The Architects' Veyrath operation had begun twelve years ago, based on the file timeline. He turned this over against everything he knew about the Architects' methodology: infiltration, manipulation, the engineering of events to escalate conflict. Not opportunistic violence—deliberate, targeted, precisely calculated to produce the maximum destabilizing effect.
A hunter's daughter, killed. Her hunter father, pushed into a retaliatory strike. The daughter herself, radicalized by grief and absorbed into the Order's training structure, shaped into their most effective weapon.
He had a thought that was deeply unwelcome.
He followed it anyway, because unwelco
