Read Chapter 11: Cracks

The knock came again, harder—three deliberate blows against the buried front door. Luc pressed his palm flat against the wood, feeling the vibration travel up his arm. The snowpack outside was at least four meters deep. Whoever was knocking was either digging through it or standing in a cavity that shouldn't exist.

“Luc.” Camille’s voice was low, controlled. She stood in the mudroom doorway, her injured arm wrapped in a makeshift sling. “The banging started two minutes ago. It stopped when you came down the stairs.”

“Then it knows I’m coming.”

“Or it’s timed.”

Luc didn’t take his eyes off the door. The oak panels were reinforced—designed to hold against a hundred-year storm, not against whatever was speaking through them in Morse-like bursts. He counted the intervals between knocks. Three long, two short. No pattern he recognized.

From the main room, Viktor’s voice boomed through the walls. “What’s going on back there? Are we being rescued?”

Luc ignored him. He pulled his headlamp from his jacket and clicked it on, sweeping the beam across the mudroom’s corners. The bench where clients removed their boots. The row of hooks holding Gore-Tex shells and wool caps. And the mudroom door itself, its hinges screwed tight from the outside—the work of someone who didn’t want that door opened again.

“Camille, go back to the hall. Keep everyone calm. Tell them it’s the snow settling.”

“It’s not the snow settling.”

“I know. Go.”

She hesitated, then left. Luc listened to her footsteps retreat across the stone floor. Alone, he pressed his ear to the door’s surface. Cold radiated off the wood like a block of ice left in a freezer.

Silence. The knocks had stopped entirely now.

Luc turned and moved through the mudroom toward the corridor that led to Henri’s room. He’d left the door ajar when Camille interrupted him—a thin crack of darkness, and through it, that persistent draft. Now, as he approached, he could hear voices inside. Muffled. One of them was Henri’s.

He pushed the door open.

Henri stood at the far end of the stripped room, his back to Luc, facing the wall where the communications equipment had been bolted. The half-burned photograph burned against Luc’s thigh in his pocket. Henri hadn’t turned around, but he must have heard the hinges creak because he said, without looking, “The wiring was old. It wasn’t sabotage.”

“The lock was professional. The equipment was professional. And the door was open when I came back here after the avalanche.”

Henri turned. His face was composed, almost relaxed—the expression of a man who had been caught and had already chosen his story. “It’s a private office. I do consulting work for clients who value discretion. The chalet owners knew. I pay extra for the room.”

“You stripped it before the snow hit?”

“I’m a private person, Luc. I don’t like strangers handling my things.”

“I wasn’t a stranger. I was checking after Camille’s injury. The power was cut from this room’s breaker, not the main panel.”

Henri’s smile tightened. “You’ve been busy.”

“Someone’s been busier.” Luc pulled the photograph from his pocket and held it up. In the dim light from the hallway, he could just make out Henri’s younger face, and beside him the scarred man whose identity had been eating at him since he’d found it. “Who is this?”

Henri’s expression flickered—a crack in the composed mask—then smoothed over. “An old colleague. We worked together fifteen years ago. He died in an accident on the Eiger.”

“Then why did you burn the photo?”

“I was cleaning out the room. Does everything require a conspiracy?”

Voices carried from the main hall—Viktor’s raised above the others. Luc heard his name being called. He stepped toward Henri, lowering his voice. “That door was screwed shut from outside. The generators were fed bad fuel. There’s a bloodstained sauna two floors down and a note from the previous guide warning about a client in this group. I’m not a detective, but I know a pattern when I see one.”

Henri’s eyes dropped to the photo in Luc’s hand. “Can I have that back?”

“Tell me who he was.”

“A guide. Like you.” Henri’s voice flattened. “He tried to save a client on the north face and paid for it. I was the one who found his body.” He met Luc’s eyes. “His name was Julien Moreau.”

The world tilted. Luc’s hand lowered involuntarily. Julien. His father. The old climbing partner of his, the man whose body had been buried in the same crevasse Luc had searched for three days when he was twenty-two years old.

Luc’s own voice came from a distance. “That’s not possible.”

“He worked under a different name at the end. Our employers preferred it that way.” Henri extended his hand toward the photo. “I burned the copies because they reminded me of a debt I couldn’t repay. Your father died saving a client who was never supposed to be on that mountain. The people who sent him there covered it up.”

Luc stared at the photograph. The scarred man—he’d never let himself think too long about the crease across his father’s jaw, the one he’d gotten from a climbing accident in the Dolomites. But here it was, in faded print, pressed against his fingertips.

“You knew him.”

“I knew of him,” Henri corrected. “I found him after the fall. He asked me to find you and tell you not to look for answers.”

“Find me? He didn’t know where I was.”

“He knew who you were. He’d kept track from a distance. He didn’t want you carrying his choices.” Henri’s voice softened. “Luc, I took this room because it’s soundproof. Because the people who hired me before this trip are the same people who hired your father. And they have very long memories.”

A shout from the hall. Viktor, his voice ragged. “Moreau! Get in here!”

Luc pocketed the photo. “This isn’t over.”

“No,” Henri agreed. “It isn’t. That’s why I want you to take the climbing gear from the storage locker and hike out at first light. There’s a supply hut eleven kilometers down the valley. It has a radio. Bring help.”

“You just said it snowed four meters. The passes are compromised.”

“Not all of them. The ridge route to the east was staked last season. If you pick your way along the spine, you can reach the hut by late afternoon.”

Luc studied Henri’s face. “Why do you want me out of the chalet?”

“Because you’re the only one who knows who I am.” Henri’s eyes held steady. “And the person who buried us in here won’t stop until there’s no one left to explain things to.”

Camille appeared in the doorway, her face pale. “Luc, Viktor’s panicking. He says someone’s been in his room. His climbing harness is missing.”

Luc looked between them—Henri’s flat, honest expression and Camille’s tight worry. The cold draft from the open door traced his spine.

He made the decision.

“Tell Viktor I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m taking one of the Skis from storage. If anyone asks, I’m checking the avalanche sheds above the tree line.” He turned to Henri. “Eleven kilometers, east ridge. What do I look for at the end?”

“The old patrol cabin at Lac Vert. Red roof. The radio’s in a steel box beside the wood stove.”

Luc nodded once and pushed past Camille into the hall. Behind him, someone in the dark knocked on the front door again—three long, two short—and this time, he knew what the pattern reminded him of.

His father’s emergency call signal. The one Luc had written into the guidebooks before they renumbered the routes and buried the old system with a generation of climbers.

Whoever was out there hadn’t come to rescue them. They’d come to finish the job Julien Moreau had started fifteen years ago. And Luc was walking toward them with a rope coiled over his shoulder.