Read Chapter 4: Paths

The wind had a knife’s edge to it now. Luc stood at the chalet’s eastern corner, one hand pressed flat against the timber as if the building itself might flinch, and scanned the snowfield that rolled toward the treeline. The storm had laid down a fresh, deceptive crust overnight—beautiful, pristine, and utterly lethal. He’d been up before first light, moving through the silent halls, checking doors, windows, the integrity of the roof beams. Old habits. The ones that kept people alive.

He found the tracks at 7:40 a.m., just as the grey light began to bully its way through the cloud cover.

Two parallel furrows, clean-edged and fresh, cutting from the chalet’s service entrance across the white expanse and angling hard toward the eastern ridge. Luc crouched, tracing the line with a gloved finger. Ski tracks. Not a groomed run, not a meandering tour. Purposeful. Someone had set out with a destination in mind.

He followed them. The crust held his weight in some places, gave way in others, each post-hole a small betrayal of his own passage. He kept the chalet at his back, the tracks ahead, and the silence of the valley pressing in like a held breath. Fifty meters out. A hundred. The tracks kinked around a rock outcrop, then straightened. Luc’s pulse ticked up a notch.

They didn’t turn.

They didn’t slow.

They ended.

Luc stood at the lip of the crevasse, looking down into a wound in the snowpack. The crack was four feet wide at its narrowest, yawning wider at the far end, and the edges were raw, recent. The tracks ran straight into it. No hesitation marks. No spray of snow where someone had planted poles and braced. Just a clean, uninterrupted line into nothing.

The beam of his headlamp cut down, found only blue-tinged shadow and the distant glint of ice. No body. No equipment. No sign of a struggle. Whoever had skied in here had simply vanished into the earth’s mouth.

Luc backed away slowly, reading the ground again. The tracks were a single set. Light, evenly spaced. Someone fit, someone who knew what they were doing. He knelt, brushed the surface snow aside, and found the faint imprint of a boot heel—one of the plastic-shelled alpine boots, not the cushioned walkers the clients favored. Not staff, then. Not Jules with his broken wrist, not the housekeeper with her worn-out knees.

A rime of frost had formed on the outside of the tracks, which meant they were older than the past hour. The storm had stopped at dawn, but the wind had been scouring the slope since midnight. If the tracks were still visible, the skier had gone out late—after the avalanche, after the storm had settled enough to move. Luc did the math. The group had been trapped for less than fourteen hours.

Someone had tried to leave in the dark.

He followed his own tracks back to the chalet, his mind turning the problem over. A crevasse doesn’t swallow a person whole without leaving something—a glove, a ski, a smear of blood where the ice bit. He’d seen bodies pulled from crevasses in Chamonix, some after days, some after decades. The mountain always kept what it took.

But the edges of this one had looked wrong. Snow had been kicked over the lip. Deliberately.

Henri Valois met him at the service door, a cup of coffee in his hand and a crease of concern between his brows. The chalet owner was in his late fifties, silver-haired, with the permanent tan of someone who spent his summers on the water and his winters on the slopes. He wore a cashmere sweater that probably cost more than Luc’s entire kit.

“You’re up early,” Henri said. “I saw you heading out. Everything secure?”

Luc brushed the frost from his jacket. “We have a problem.”

He told him about the tracks. The crevasse. The way they ended.

Henri’s expression shifted through several stages—puzzlement, then impatience, then a tight, dismissive smile. “A prank,” he said. “Someone in the group, trying to make a point. You know how these people get when they’re bored. The young one, the American—what’s his name, Tucker?—he’s always filming stunts for his followers.”

“No one would stage that,” Luc said. “Not in this weather. Not at night.”

“You’re certain they were fresh?”

“Fresh enough. Cut after the snow stopped.”

Henri took a sip of coffee, studying Luc over the rim of the cup. His eyes were flat, unreadable. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you what I saw. Someone left this chalet last night and did not come back.”

“Or they skied out, hit the crevasse, and managed to climb out further along,” Henri said. “You haven’t checked the whole length of it.”

“I checked enough.”

“And you want to organize a search party.” Henri’s voice was mild, but something under it had hardened. “We have limited fuel, limited daylight, and a group of frightened people who are already close to panic. If I tell them someone’s out there, possibly hurt, they’ll want to go looking. And then we’ll have more casualties.”

“You’d rather leave them?”

Henri set his cup down on the windowsill, his jaw tightening. “I’d rather not add to the body count,” he said. “We don’t have the resources for rescue missions. We have to focus on survival.”

Luc studied him a moment longer. There was something careful in Henri’s voice—a man choosing his words with precision rather than speaking from instinct. A man protecting something.

“Fine,” Luc said, though he meant the opposite. “No search party.”

He turned to go, then stopped. The service corridor led past the storeroom where the satellite phone had been taken. But beyond that, deeper in the chalet’s spine, there was a door Luc had never seen open. Oak, heavy, with a keypad lock set into the frame.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

Henri’s gaze flickered, just for a second, to the door and away. “Storage. Old equipment. Nothing you need.”

“Every room in this chalet has been accounted for except that one. We’re trapped here. If there’s gear in there—radios, batteries, anything—we need to know.”

“There isn’t.” Henri stepped past him, positioning himself between Luc and the door. His smile had resurfaced, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ve already checked. It’s just Valois family clutter. Ski trophies, old photographs, things my wife refuses to throw away.”

Luc held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded slowly and walked away.

He didn’t believe him. That was fine. He didn’t need Henri’s permission.

He made his rounds, checking the boarded windows, the coal bunker—enough for another three days, maybe four if they rationed—and the pantry, where Jules sat with his arm splinted and his face grey with pain. Luc had wrapped the wrist the night before, tight enough to immobilize but not cut off circulation. Camille had helped, her hands steadier than Luc expected from a woman who spent her days chasing stories, not injuries.

“How’s the arm?” Luc asked.

Jules’s laugh was thin. “I’ve had worse.” He gestured with his good hand at the shelves. “We have about four days of food if I stretch it. Five if we skip breakfast.”

“We’ll make it work.”

Jules watched him with knowing eyes. He’d been a mountain guide himself, once. He read Luc’s face the way Luc read snowpack. “You’re thinking about something.”

Luc didn’t answer.

“You’re thinking about leaving,” Jules said. “Going for help.”

“The tracks outside ended at a crevasse,” Luc said. “Someone tried last night. I don’t know if they made it out or not, but I know they didn’t come back.”

Jules was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “And Henri knows something about it.”

“Henri knows something about a lot of things.”

Jules nodded slowly, his eyes drifting to the corridor beyond the pantry. “That locked room,” he said. “I’ve worked here six years. Never seen the inside of it.”

Luc followed his gaze. Six years. And the man who owned this chalet had never once opened that door in front of his staff.

He thought of the ski tracks, clean and straight, running into the crevasse with no hesitation. He thought of the data override on the weather station, the cut radio wire, the missing satellite phone. He thought of Henri’s flat eyes and careful words.

The mountain was not the only thing in this valley that was lying to him.