Read Chapter 7: Fracture

The sauna door was still hanging crooked when Luc came back through the lounge, the smell of stale sweat and copper clinging to his jacket. He'd wiped the blood off his fingers with snow, but the stain on the floorboards back there had been fresh enough to glisten. Fresh enough to mean someone had been bleeding in this chalet within the last day or two. He hadn't told them that. He hadn't told them a lot of things.

The argument reached him before he got to the great room.

"– six hundred euros a bottle, you miserable little–"

Viktor's voice was a bullhorn. Luc rounded the corner to find the Russian standing over Pierre, the chef, who had backed himself against the kitchen island with a whisk still in his hand, face pale but jaw set. A bottle of red wine lay on its side between them, unbroken but clearly the subject of the dispute.

"I told you," Pierre said, his accent thick with strain, "I did not take it. It was already open when I came down to start the dinner prep. I used it for the sauce, yes, but that is my job. To cook."

"To steal." Viktor jabbed a finger at the bottle. "That is a 2005 Château Margaux. You think I don't know what I brought? You think I don't count my own cases?"

"I don't care about your cases." Pierre's voice cracked. "I care that we are trapped and you are screaming at me about wine."

"Enough." Luc stepped between them, hands out, flat. The move was automatic—the same one he'd used a hundred times to break up fights between clients who'd had too much altitude and too much money. "Viktor. Step back."

"He stole from me."

"You don't know that." Luc kept his voice low and even. "And right now, we have bigger problems than your cellar."

Viktor's face mottled. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, with a jaw that looked like it had been carved from concrete. Luc had seen his type a hundred times: men who bought mountains because they couldn't buy respect. "You think you're in charge now, guide? You think because you know how to read snow, you know how to run people?"

"I think if we fight each other, we freeze." Luc held his gaze. "That's not a metaphor. That's a fact."

For a long moment, Viktor looked like he might swing. Luc watched his shoulders, his hips, the shift of weight. He'd have the man on the floor in three seconds if it came to it, but that wasn't the play. That was never the play.

Then Viktor huffed, bent down, and snatched the bottle off the floor. "Fine. But this isn't over."

He stormed past Luc, shouldering him hard enough to make a point, and disappeared down the hall toward his wing of the chalet. The group in the lounge—Camille, Jules, a couple of the others—exchanged glances that were half relief, half fear.

Pierre let out a shaky breath. "Merci."

"Don't thank me yet." Luc glanced at the chef. "Was the bottle actually missing from his stash?"

Pierre's eyes flickered. "It was on the counter. I assumed one of the staff had opened it before the avalanche. The door to the cellar was unlocked."

Luc filed that away. The cellar. He hadn't thought to check the wine cellar. Most of these chalets had more than just bottles down there—often backup supplies, tools, sometimes even an old radio.

He left Pierre to the others and moved through the chalet, his path taking him past the generator room at the back of the service corridor. The door was ajar. That was odd—he'd closed it after the last check, when he'd confirmed the diesel levels were adequate for another week at least.

He pushed it open.

The generator sat in the corner, a squat green beast still ticking with residual heat. The room smelled of fuel and ozone. And on the floor, just beside the fuel intake valve, lay a ski pole.

Snapped in two.

Luc crouched. The break was clean, a sharp fracture in the carbon fiber, not a bend. Someone had snapped it deliberately, over a knee or against the generator housing. He picked up the two pieces. The basket was still attached to the lower half. There was a name written in marker on the grip of the upper piece, faded but legible: *B. Keller*.

Not one of the current guests. Luc turned the pieces over in his hands. Keller. The name didn't ring a bell, not from the manifest, not from the guest list Camille had shown him. But the pole was here, in the generator room, snapped on purpose. Not lost. Not accidental. *Discarded*.

He looked closer at the generator. The fuel line was intact. The filter looked clean. But something had been placed between the cooling vents—a small, wadded piece of cloth, dark with oil. Luc pulled it out. It was a handkerchief, monogrammed with a single embroidered *V*.

Viktor.

Luc stood slowly, the cloth and the broken pole in his hands. This didn't make sense. Viktor was an asshole, but the sabotage that had been done here—the weather station override, the cut radio wiring, the missing satellite phone—that required precision and timing. Not the work of a man who screamed at a chef over a bottle of wine.

Unless that was the point. Unless the screaming was the cover.

He pocketed the handkerchief and left the generator room, closing the door behind him. The corridor was quiet. Through the window at the end of the hall, he could see the valley below, the storm bands finally broken, the moon casting a silver sheen over the snow. And there—again—the orange light. Flickering. Small. Like a candle in a window, or a headlamp moving through the trees.

Someone was down there.

Luc's jaw tightened. If the storm had cleared, the patrol hut was a half-day's trek east, if the crevasse could be circumvented. He could go at first light. Leave the group, travel light, bring back help. He'd done it before, in worse conditions, with less at stake.

But if he left, the saboteur would have free run of the chalet.

He turned back toward the lounge, the weight of the broken pole in his coat pocket. He'd told Camille about the weather station override. He hadn't told her about this. He hadn't told her about the blood in the sauna, or the fresh ski tracks leading to the crevasse, or the fact that someone in this chalet had been bleeding within the last twenty-four hours and hadn't said a word.

He found Camille in the lounge, alone now except for Jules, who was stoking the fire. She looked up when he entered, and her eyes went immediately to his coat pocket.

"What did you find?"

Luc glanced at Jules. The young man's back was still turned, his attention on the flames. Luc crossed to Camille and sat beside her, keeping his voice low.

"Someone left a broken ski pole in the generator room. And a handkerchief with Viktor's initial on it."

Camille's eyebrows rose. "You think Viktor–"

"I think someone wants me to think Viktor." Luc shook his head. "It's too neat. Too obvious. The sabotage we've seen so far—that wasn't a tantrum. That was skill. Whoever did this knows this chalet, knows its systems, knows how weather data works and how to cut a radio wire so it fails later, not immediately."

Camille absorbed that. "So someone's framing him."

"Or he's smarter than he looks." Luc let out a breath. "Either way, I'm not going to figure it out by sitting here. The storm's broken. The patrol hut is reachable if I leave at dawn. I need to go."

"Go?" Camille's voice sharpened. "Leave us?"

"I'll be back before nightfall. With flares, maybe a radio. But I can't keep protecting this group from a threat I can't identify." He met her eyes. "If I stay, someone else is going to end up dead. Or worse."

Camille was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "Before you go, you should see this. I found it this morning. In the kitchen, tucked behind the spice rack. It's addressed to you."

Luc took it. The paper was old, creased, the ink smeared. It was written in a neat, compact hand.

*If you're reading this, you're the new one. I tried to warn them. Keller was the first. There's a client in this group who isn't who they say they are. I don't have proof. I only have what I saw. Ask about the guide before me. The one who vanished. He knew.*

The note was unsigned. Luc read it twice, then folded it carefully and slid it into his pocket beside the broken ski pole.

"What's in it?" Camille asked.

Luc thought about the blood in the sauna, the snapped pole, the orange light flickering in the valley below. Then he looked at Camille—her steady gaze, her careful questions, her too-perfect timing—and made a decision.

"Nothing helpful," he said. "Just an old shopping list."

Her eyes told him she didn't believe him. But she didn't push.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windows. Somewhere in the chalet, a door slammed. And Luc stood, moving toward the east window, toward the orange light that still flickered in the dark below—a beacon, or a warning, he couldn't yet tell.