Read Chapter 9: Avalanche

The mountain made a sound Luc had heard twice before in his life—a low, wet groan, like something enormous turning over in its sleep. He was at the kitchen window when it came, watching the dawn light bleed gray across the valley, and he knew before the floor began to tremble what was coming.

“Get away from the windows!” he shouted.

The chalet shuddered. Glasses rattled off shelves and shattered on the stone floor. Somewhere upstairs, a woman screamed. The groan deepened into a roar, and the whole building listed sideways like a ship taking water, timbers screaming in protest.

Luc threw himself flat against the wall, one arm over his head. The lights flickered once, twice, and died. Darkness folded over them, thick and absolute.

The roar passed. The shaking stopped.

For a moment, no one breathed.

Then someone—Nadia, he thought—began to sob in short, sharp gasps. A chair scraped. A man cursed in German. The smell of cold air and fine, powdery snow seeped through the walls, and Luc realized the temperature had already begun to drop.

“Everyone,” he said, keeping his voice low and even. “Hold where you are. No one move until I find a light.”

He moved from memory, one hand against the wall, stepping over what felt like a shattered platter of ceramics. His fingers found the emergency kit by the pantry door. He unzipped it, felt the familiar weight of the flashlight, and clicked it on.

The beam revealed the wreckage of the great room. The long oak table had slid half a meter toward the south wall, throwing chairs and bottles and silverware in a tangled heap. A bookshelf had tipped, spilling hardcovers across the Persian rug. The windows on the eastern face were dark, not with night but with snow—packed tight against the glass, sealing them in.

Henri stood at the base of the stairs, one hand gripping the banister, his face drained of color. Viktor had taken cover behind an overturned armchair, his expensive coat dusted with plaster. Pierre was helping Nadia to her feet, her hand pressed against her mouth.

Jules appeared from the back corridor, holding a kerosene lantern, its flame swaying with the last tremors of the mountain’s settling.

“The entrance is gone,” Jules said. His voice was calm, but his eyes were wide. “Snow piled against the door. Fifteen feet, maybe more. We’re not leaving that way.”

“Power?” Luc asked.

Jules shook his head. “Line’s dead. Winterized, but—” He gestured at the windows. “It’s all snow. The generator should work—I’ll check the fuel line.”

“I’ll go with you,” Camille said. She emerged from the hallway that led to the west wing, a gash on her forearm bleeding through her shirtsleeve. She noticed Luc looking at it. “Bookshelf. Caught me off guard.”

“Someone should see to that,” Luc said.

“It’s fine.”

“Camille.”

“It’s fine.” Her voice left no room for argument. She turned to Jules. “Show me the generator.”

They disappeared into the dark. Luc counted heads. Viktor, Pierre, Nadia, Henri. The others—there were eight of them in total, and he counted again, trying to place who else was in the building. Elena, the quiet architect, standing at the far end of the room with her arms wrapped around herself. That was five. Jules and Camille made seven.

And there was an eighth. Someone registered at the edges of his vision but not in the center of the room. He swept the flashlight beam across the shadows.

Serge, the older Frenchman with the silver watch and the quiet way of moving, sat alone on the bench by the cold fireplace. He hadn’t moved during the avalanche. He hadn’t flinched. Now he sat with his hands folded, watching the others with an expression Luc couldn’t read.

“Everyone uninjured?” Luc called out. “Check yourselves and the person next to you. Any blood, any breathlessness, any numbness—say it now.”

Mumbles. Shakes of heads. Pierre was helping Nadia to a chair by the extinguished lantern, and as she passed through the beam of Luc’s flashlight, he noticed her hand at her ribs. She saw him looking and dropped it.

“I’m fine,” she said, before he could ask. “The chair caught me. Bruise, maybe.”

Luc nodded. He moved to the windows, pressing his palm against the glass. Cold crept in through the seam. The snowpack outside was dense, compacted—a secondary slide, smaller than the first, but heavy enough to bury the entrance and seal the shutters on the eastern face. He looked up. The roofline was still clear. For now.

“We need a plan,” Pierre said. He had retrieved a dust-covered bottle from the floor, unlabeled, and was pouring himself a glass with trembling hands. “We can’t stay here forever. That thing—if it hits again, the roof could—”

“It won’t hit again,” Luc said.

“You can’t know that.”

“I can.” Luc set the flashlight on the table, beam pointed at the ceiling, casting a pale pool of light across the room. “That was a sympathetic slide. The mountain’s still settling from the first event. But the main slab has already released—the load is gone. What hit us was crown ice, a secondary pocket, debris from the shoulder above the tree line. It’s not building the same way. It would need a new accumulation cycle, and that requires weather we don’t have right now.”

He watched Pierre process the words. Some of the tremor eased from his hands.

“But we’re blocked in,” Pierre said.

“We are.” Luc looked around the room. “For now. That doesn’t mean we’re trapped. The east-facing patios will have blown clear—the wind did most of the work up there. We have skis, we have mountaineering gear in the mudroom, and we have someone here who grew up on these slopes.” He glanced at Jules, who had returned from the generator room with Camille behind him. “How bad is it?”

“Fuel line’s cracked,” Jules said. “I can patch it, but it’ll take a few hours and some cold hands. The batteries are holding for now. We’ll have lights until nightfall, maybe. After that, we’re lanterns and candles.”

“Then we conserve power,” Luc said. “Everyone moves into the great room. Bedding from upstairs, pillows, anything warm. We stay together, we rotate watch in two-hour shifts, and no one goes outside alone.”

Viktor laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. He climbed out from behind the armchair, brushing dust from his sleeves. “Who put you in charge, guide? You and your little lessons about the mountain.” He gestured at the snow-packed windows. “The mountain just tried to kill us. I’m not following your rules.”

“You can freeze alone, then,” Luc said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “The front door’s buried. The back patio exits into a fifty-meter runout that ends in a steep lee slope that will slide again if we drop a spoon on it the wrong way. The temperature outside is dropping, the wind is coming up, and there’s a storm cell back-building in the west.” He stepped toward Viktor, the flashlight beam casting his shadow long across the wall. “The rules aren’t mine. They’re the mountain’s. I know how to follow them. Do you?”

Viktor’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked at the others. No one met his gaze. After a long moment, he turned and walked to the far side of the room, where he sat heavily on a stack of fallen books.

Luc let out a slow breath. He looked at the group. “Jules, you take first watch on the east wing where the patios are. Anyone goes near those doors, you stop them.”

Jules nodded.

“Camille and I will work on the generator.”

“Wait.” Henri’s voice cut through the room. He had moved from the stairs to the hallway, and he stood now with his hand on the frame of the corridor that led to the west wing—the corridor with the locked room. His face was tight, his jaw set. “You should stay here. Comfort the guests. I can show Camille the generator. I know the system.”

“Henri cleared it last winter,” Jules said quietly.

Luc held Henri’s gaze. A minute passed. An hour. The silence in the room was absolute, filled only by the creak of settling snow above them.

“All right,” Luc said at last. “Henri goes.”

He watched the property manager disappear down the dark hallway, Camille behind him. She walked close to Henri, too close—like she was listening to something he was saying. Luc couldn’t hear the words.

He turned back to the room. The group had begun to move, gathering blankets from the upstairs, sorting debris from the path. Pierre was telling Elena something about the wine he’d rescued, a joke she didn’t laugh at. Nadia had found a first aid kit and was wrapping a strip of gauze around her ribs, wincing when she pulled it tight.

And Serge still sat by the cold fireplace, unmoved, unhelping, watching.

Luc’s flashlight began to dim. He shook it, and it brightened, then steadied. He was about to head for the mudroom to check the state of their exit options when he passed the end of the west hallway, and a draft of cold air touched his face.

He stopped.

The draft came from the doorway of the locked room. He aimed his light at it. The door stood an inch ajar, the gap dark as a held breath. A thin sliver of metal—the lock plate—gleamed in the beam. The frame was splintered around the bolt.

Luc frowned. The avalanche’s force had rattled the building, listed it, shaken the doors in their frames. He could feel the cold air flowing out of the room, thick and chilled, like a cave.

He took a step toward it.

Then Jules’s voice echoed down the hall. “Luc. The mudroom door. There’s a problem.”

Luc held the light on the gap for another heartbeat. Then he turned away.