Read Chapter 27: Debt

Luc found Henri in the wine cellar, exactly where he expected him. Not hiding—Henri was too clever for that—but counting bottles like a man taking inventory of his own life. The storm had pressed the lodge into darkness except for the weak halo of a camp lantern between them, casting Henri's face in pale orange and shadow.

"Red or white?" Henri asked without turning. "If you've come to drink your courage, I recommend the Bordeaux. Nineteen eighty-two. I was saving it for—" He stopped, finally looking at Luc. Whatever he saw made him set down the bottle. "Ah."

Luc closed the cellar door behind him. The click of the latch echoed like a gunshot in the stone room.

"You knew I'd figure it out."

"I knew you'd try." Henri's hand stayed near the wine rack, but his shoulders had dropped—not surrender, but resignation. "You always were the one who couldn't let things lie. That's what made you good with the clients. And what made you impossible to work for."

"Stop spinning. You don't get to run your old-gossip game with me anymore." Luc stepped closer, boots grinding grit into the stone floor. "You forced my contract onto Barreau. You made sure I was on this trip. You wanted me here, watching this house of cards, because you knew it was going to collapse."

Henri exhaled through his nose. A long, slow breath like a tire going flat.

"The weather station," Luc said. "I checked the calibration after I found the compass sabotage. The temperature readings were off by nearly two degrees. Not a malfunction—a manual override. Someone set the station to report warmer conditions than existed. Anyone checking data would have thought the avalanche risk was moderate. You've been running backcountry trips out of this lodge for thirty years, Henri. You know that mountain like your own heartbeat. You knew what you were doing."

Henri's mouth twisted. He picked up the bottle again, not to drink—just to hold something.

"Did you think it would play out the way it did? The slide took the whole lower face. If the group had been on schedule—"

"But they weren't on schedule, were they?" Henri set the bottle down with a thunk. "That's the part you keep missing, Luc. The plan was never for anyone to die. Gaspard was supposed to pull his usual grift—bleed a few tourists dry with a sob story, run his fake passport nonsense, then vanish with the next helicopter. I just needed a story. A dramatic rescue. A near-miss in the Alps that would put the lodge's name in every winter sports magazine from Chamonix to Courchevel."

Luc's hands clenched at his sides. "You manufactured an avalanche risk for publicity."

"I manufactured a controlled demonstration." Henri's voice tightened. "The readings I adjusted were only a few degrees. Weather models predicted a slide on the eastern face, but it should have been small. Contained. The type that impresses clients and makes for good footage without hurting anyone."

"But the storm shifted. The face broke bigger than you predicted."

Henri's silence was the only answer.

"For how long?" Luc asked. "How long have you been running this lodge on borrowed trust and cheap tricks?"

"Since your accident."

The words hit Luc like a cold pool. His vision narrowed. He was back on the ridge in his mind—the sound of cracking ice, the scream swallowed by white, the face of the climber he'd lost years ago. Not in the mountains. In a crevasse in his own memory.

"That's your angle? Guilt?"

"I'm not playing an angle, Luc. I'm explaining a debt." Henri stepped out from behind the wine rack, his face hard now, stripped of its jovial mask. "After the accident, your reputation was finished. No client would hire you. But I gave you work. I vouched for you. I wrote letters, called old colleagues, dragged your name through every door I could kick open until someone agreed to let you consult again."

"You did that so you'd own me."

"I did that because I know what it's like to watch your whole life slide off a mountain and have no one to blame but yourself." Henri's voice cracked on the final word. "And for eight years, you paid me back by being the best avalanche man on this side of the Alps. Your reports were gold. Your caution saved lives. I built my entire modern reputation on your warnings."

"Until you decided to ignore them for a headline."

"Until the lodge started losing money." Henri spread his hands, a gesture of ugly honesty. "The bank was going to take it. Foreclose on everything, close the doors, send fourteen employees into the winter without jobs or severance. I didn't have capital. I didn't have investments. I only had my knowledge of that mountain and a man who'd taught me everything I knew about its moods."

"So you gambled with all our lives to save your hotel."

"You would have done the same. If someone told you that by twisting a few numbers, you could save the place that raised you, put food in the mouths of people who depended on you—" Henri shook his head. "No. You wouldn't. That's the difference between us. You'd let it all fall rather than bend your precious code."

Luc seized Henri's collar and shoved him against the wine rack. Bottles rattled and clinked in the darkness. "People are dead, Henri. Klaus is dead. The storm is killing us inside this lodge. Pierre is bleeding on the floor upstairs because of the pressure you created. And you're standing here talking to me about publicity."

Henri didn't fight. He just looked at Luc, something almost like pity in his eyes.

"Then let me give you the truth you actually came for." Henri's voice dropped low. "I adjusted the weather station. I lied about the risk level. But I never sabotaged that compass. I never cut detonator wire. And I didn't touch Pierre."

Luc held him there, staring into those familiar old eyes, searching for the crack, the tell, the seam of falsehood. He couldn't find one.

"Then who did?"

Henri's mouth opened, and the lights came back on—a shuddering, angry flicker that made them both flinch. Bootsteps pounded on the stairs above.

"Luc!" Camille's voice echoed down between the ceiling beams. "The generator's working! And Pierre—Pierre says he remembers who attacked him. He says it wasn't a man."

Luc released Henri. The old man sagged, rubbing his throat.

"A woman," Camille called out. Her voice was hollow, barely audible over the groaning storm. "He says it was a woman. She wore gloves, but he saw the watch. A man's watch, gold. Heavy."

Luc's blood turned to ice as the pieces snapped together—the false passport in Viktor's room, the compass misdirection, the watch he'd seen on a wrist he'd assumed belonged to a man.

Henri let out a breath that was almost laughter.

"Now you see it," he whispered. "Now you see everything I've known since the first night."