Read Chapter 10: The Locked Room

The door hung open maybe three inches, a dark seam against the pale wood of the corridor. Luc’s flashlight beam played across the gap, catching dust motes drifting in the cold air that bled out from within. The generator hum was gone now—dead since the slide—and the quiet pressed in around them, thick as snow.

He pushed the door wider with his boot heel, keeping his body angled away from the opening. Old habit. Doorways were ambush points. But the room beyond was still, no shift of weight, no creak of floorboards, no breath but his own.

The beam swept left. Communications equipment. A lot of it. A shortwave radio unit, a signal amplifier, a satellite phone dock, a bank of battery chargers—all dead, all dark. Cables ran along the walls in neat bundles, clipped and tied, ending at a junction box with its cover off. The main breaker inside had been thrown. Not blown. Thrown. Someone had killed the power to this room deliberately, and then, judging by the neatly coiled cords and the dust-free surfaces, they’d made sure nothing in here would run without it.

Luc stepped inside. The room was small, maybe twelve feet square, but it felt larger in the flashlight’s narrow cast. A desk sat against the far wall, laminated wood, utilitarian. Behind it, a cheap office chair. On the desk: a notepad, a pen, a scarred coffee mug with the resort’s logo. Nothing personal. Whoever used this space had stripped it clean—or someone else had done it for them.

He opened the notepad. The top page was blank. He flipped through. All blank. He set it down and pulled the desk drawer. Empty. The one beneath it. Empty. He ran his hand along the underside of the desk, feeling for tape, for a lump, for anything. Nothing.

The wind moaned low against the building’s flank, and the cold deepened. He could see his breath now. The room had no heat source of its own, and with the chalet’s furnace down, the temperature here was dropping fast.

He crouched and swept the light under the desk. A crumpled ball of paper, wedged between the chair mat and the wall. He fished it out, smoothed it against his thigh.

It was a photo, half-burned. A corner had been singed and blackened, but the faces were intact. Two men, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning at the camera. Ski gear, goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Alpine backdrop. One of them was Henri. Younger, a few years less of weight and worry, but unmistakable—the same broad nose, the same thinning hair, the same loud laugh frozen mid-bark.

The other man, Luc didn’t know. Early thirties, lean, dark-eyed. A faint scar ran through his left eyebrow. He wore a soft-shell jacket that looked expensive, the kind of thing tourists bought at the high-end shop in Chamonix and never really wore outdoors—though the man in the photo had clearly worn it plenty. There was a dusting of frost on his collar.

Luc turned the photo over. Nothing on the back. No date, no name, no inscription. He pocketed it.

His light found one more thing. On the wall beside the desk, a corkboard—bare, but with faint rectangular outlines where something had been pinned. He traced a finger along the marks. Old paper had left stains, ghostly rectangles in the board’s fading cork. Notes, probably. Maybe a map. All cleared out.

The air shifted. A draft from the corridor—someone standing in the doorway.

Luc turned. Camille leaned against the jamb, her good arm wrapped across her body, the other held tight in a makeshift sling. Her face was pale, the gash on her arm hidden beneath the sweater she’d tied off, but her eyes were sharp.

“Find anything?” she asked.

“Communications room,” he said. “Batteries are dead. The main breakers are off.” He gestured with the flashlight. “Someone knew what they were doing. They didn’t just cut power—they cut access. This room won’t run without a full rewire.”

“That’s why you took that job,” Camille said. “The consultant one. You read the systems.”

“I read the systems.”

“So read this one.” She stepped inside, the floorboards creaking under her weight. “This room doesn’t belong to the resort. I know the floor plan. Henri’s office was supposed to be on the third floor, above the games room. This is storage on the blueprints.”

Luc looked at her. “You memorized the blueprints?”

“I saw them when I booked the chalet.” She met his gaze, unblinking. “You think I came here without checking the exits?”

He didn’t answer. She had a point. She moved past him, trailing her hand along the cables, stopping at the junction box.

“This isn’t a hacked-together setup,” she said. “This is professional. Someone with a reason to keep a low profile.” She glanced back at him. “Or someone who wanted to monitor the house without anyone knowing.”

“The previous guide’s note,” Luc said. “He mentioned a client with a problem.”

“A client who isn’t who they claim to be.” Camille’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “Maybe you’re not the only one in this chalet wearing a borrowed past, Luc.”

He let that land. He’d been careful with his own history, but not careful enough, apparently. The accident on the Dru. The three dead climbers. The name Moreau had carried weight in Chamonix—and a stain.

“I’m not hiding anything,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“Good.” She turned toward the doorway, then paused. “Because I found something else. The mudroom door—the one Jules said was stuck? It wasn’t stuck. Someone had driven a screw through the latch from outside.”

Luc’s blood chilled. “From outside?”

“From outside,” she repeated. “There’s a hole in the wood straight through to the frame. Whoever did it wanted to lock us in.”

“Or keep someone out.”

Camille shook her head. “There’s no one out there. The avalanche saw to that.” She stepped back into the corridor, and her voice carried a brittle edge. “Whatever’s happening here, it started before the snow fell. And the person who set it up is still inside—watching, waiting, making sure nobody walks out of this valley until they’re ready.”

She left. The corridor swallowed her footsteps.

Luc stood alone in the cold room, the half-burned photo heavy in his pocket. He pulled it out again, angled it into the flashlight beam. The unknown man with the scarred eyebrow stared back at him, grinning, one arm thrown around Henri’s shoulders like they were brothers. But there was something in the man’s posture that Luc had missed at first—the way his other hand was tucked into his jacket, not relaxed, not casual. Guarded. The jacket was expensive but cutting-edge functional, not warm-weather luxury. This was a man who dressed for utility.

Henri had stood beside a man who was ready for trouble. And now Henri was in the generator room, alone with Camille, who was nursing an injury and asking sharp questions.

Luc pocketed the photo again and moved toward the door. The cold draft from the corridor caught him full in the chest, and with it came a new sound, faint at first, then unmistakable: the rhythmic crunch of footsteps in deep snow. Approaching the main entrance.

He killed his flashlight. Listened.

The footsteps stopped.

Then something scraped against the front door—metal on wood. A deliberate sound. Not the wind. Not drift.

Someone was outside.