Centuria Books · Snowbound Secrets
Snowbound Secrets — Read the First Chapter
Six strangers, one blizzard, one buried murder—and a lodge with secrets that refuse to stay dead.
Chapter 1 – The Gathering Storm
The first flakes descended with a quiet treachery as Claire Winters heaved the final cord of firewood onto the covered porch of Whispering Pines Lodge. She straightened, wincing as her lower back protested, and watched her breath form ghost-like plumes in the biting air. The snow wasn’t falling in the gentle, dreamy way that postcards depicted—these were small, sharp crystals that stung exposed skin and accumulated with alarming efficiency. A hunter’s snow. Deliberate and merciless.
Three days ahead of schedule.
Claire pulled her worn leather glove off with her teeth and checked her watch—2:17 p.m. The guests weren’t due to arrive for another four hours. Plenty of time to finish provisioning the cabin and descend the mountain before the roads transformed from merely dangerous to impassable.
Or so she told herself.
She stomped her boots against the rough-hewn welcome mat, dislodging clumps of snow that had already collected in the deep treads. The oak door resisted before yielding with a groan that reminded Claire of her grandfather’s complaints about his arthritic knee. Inside, warmth from the fire she’d kindled that morning still clung to the air, the massive stone fireplace dominating the great room like an ancient monument.
To call this place a cabin was like calling a great white shark just a fish. From the exterior, Whispering Pines resembled a rustic mountain retreat, all weathered timber and wisps of smoke curling from river stone chimneys that had witnessed half a century of Montana winters. Step inside, however, and the pretense of simplicity evaporated. Hand-knotted Persian rugs worth more than Claire’s annual income softened footfalls across wide-plank pine floors. Italian leather furniture in butter-soft cognac created conversation areas throughout the cavernous great room. The kitchen would make professional chefs weep—Wolf range, Sub-Zero refrigerator, marble countertops that stretched like a landlocked sea. Old money playing at roughing it, with a price tag of $2,000 per night to prove it.
Claire moved with methodical precision through her checklist, the ritual calming her growing unease about the weather. She counted fresh towels (thirty-six, plush and monogrammed), checked expiration dates on emergency supplies (all current), tested the satellite phone (functional, for now), and stocked the refrigerator with the specialty items requested by each guest—almond milk for the Broadway actress, craft beer for the doctor, imported cheese for the siblings who’d paid extra for the wine pairing with each dinner.
Control what you can control. The mantra had kept her functioning these past eighteen months, since the night that ended her law enforcement career and started her self-imposed exile into wilderness guiding.
When her phone chimed with an alert, she was in the temperature-controlled cellar, inventorying bottles of wine that cost more than a week’s salary from her former job as deputy sheriff. It seemed absurd to care whether the 2015 Bordeaux was properly displayed when she’d once survived three days on beef jerky and river water after a guide rope snapped during a mountain rescue.
EMERGENCY ALERT: WINTER STORM WARNING UPGRADED TO BLIZZARD. CATASTROPHIC CONDITIONS EXPECTED. ALL TRAVEL DISCOURAGED. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.
The timestamp: 2:46 p.m.
Her phone’s signal bars: already vanished.
“Damn it,” Claire muttered, taking the cellar stairs two at a time, her hand sliding along the smooth pine banister.
Outside, the transformation stole her breath more effectively than the cold. In just thirty minutes, the world had morphed from picturesque mountain scene to churning white chaos. The pines surrounding the cabin swayed dangerously, limbs heavy with accumulation, bowing before wind that careened down the mountainside with the ferocity of a freight train.
Claire had witnessed Montana blizzards since childhood—measuring winters by how many times her father’s police cruiser needed digging out—but this felt different. The sky had taken on that strange yellowish-gray hue that made her think of bruises and bad omens. The barometric pressure had dropped so rapidly that her ears had popped twice in the last hour.
This wasn’t just bad. This was the storm old-timers still spoke of in hushed tones at Blackwater Falls’ only bar—the kind that rearranged the mountain and took lives in the process.
Claire calculated rapidly, facts clicking into place like bullets in a chamber. The guests would be en route already, likely past the point where cell reception failed, that notorious dead zone beginning three miles back at Widow’s Curve. The winding access road—steep, with thirteen switchbacks and no guardrails in sections—would soon become a death trap. If she left now, pushed her Jeep to its limits, she might reach her small cabin in the valley before the worst hit. But that would mean abandoning six unprepared tourists to a blizzard that was already rewriting forecasts.
As if nature had orchestrated the timing to force her hand, headlights pierced the thickening curtain of white, crawling up the final switchback to the cabin. Too late.
Claire trudged to her Jeep, now wearing a two-inch snow hat despite being parked only twenty minutes earlier. She yanked open the door against the wind’s resistance and grabbed her emergency pack—ninety pounds of survival equipment that had saved lives more than once. As she hoisted it onto her shoulder, her vehicle disappeared beneath a fresh layer of white, erased like it had never existed.
A sleek black Range Rover lurched to a stop beside the now-invisible Jeep, its tires spinning uselessly before the engine cut. The luxury vehicle seemed offensively out of place against the primal violence of the gathering storm.
A tall man emerged, hunched against the assault. Dark hair immediately frosted white, he clutched a leather weekend bag to his chest with one hand while the other shielded his eyes. His clothes broadcast money and city life—a wool coat that probably cost two thousand dollars but would be useless against prolonged exposure, leather boots better suited to boardrooms than blizzards. Yet something in his purposeful movements suggested he wasn’t entirely foreign to hardship.
“Whispering Pines?” he called, voice nearly stolen by the wind.
“Yes,” Claire shouted back, gesturing urgently. “Inside, now!”
The man needed no further encouragement, crossing the distance with long strides. Claire held the door, stealing one final glance at the sky, which had darkened to the color of wet slate. The mountain was disappearing, swallowed whole by white.
“Are the others behind you?” she asked as he crossed the threshold.
“Others?” The man stomped snow from his boots onto the mat, creating a small puddle that would be the first of many. “I passed an SUV about fifteen minutes back, moving at a crawl. Driver looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
Great. Five more unprepared tourists navigating a road that was vanishing by the minute.
Claire locked the door behind them, though the gesture felt as futile as a child hiding under blankets from a monster. The man turned, snowmelt dripping from his dark hair onto a face that belonged in luxury watch advertisements—strong jaw with the shadow of a day’s stubble, straight nose, eyes the precise shade of pine resin in sunlight. The kind of handsome that made Claire immediately suspicious.
“You must be the caretaker Emerson mentioned,” he said, extending his hand. “Archer Reed.”
Claire ignored both the handshake and the assumption, brushing past him to drop her emergency pack on the kitchen island with a heavy thud. “Claire Winters. I’m not the caretaker. I’m a wilderness guide who was hired to stock this place and leave before the storm hit.” She pulled off her gloves, flexing fingers that had gone numb despite their protection. “The forecast was wrong.”
“Catastrophically wrong, it seems,” he agreed, gaze drifting to windows now rattling in their frames as the wind battered them. “Will the others make it safely?”
Claire crossed to the fireplace, adding another log from the brass holder to build up heat they would desperately need. The fire hissed and sparked as if in protest.
“If they don’t turn back, yes. The road only leads here. But none of you will be leaving.” She used a cast iron poker to shift the logs, creating maximum exposure to oxygen. “Not for days.”
Reed’s expression shifted—not to panic, which she’d expected from someone wearing four-hundred-dollar shoes in a blizzard—but to something more calculating. His eyes narrowed slightly as he assessed the situation.
“How many days are we talking about?”
“This system…” Claire paused, choosing her words carefully. No need to cause premature panic, but neither would she sugarcoat reality. “The pressure readings and wind patterns resemble the ’78 storm. My father was sheriff then. They found cars buried under eight feet of snow, people trapped in their vehicles for days. Some didn’t make it.”
“You’re saying we could be stuck here for a week.”
Not a question. This man grasped implications quickly.
“At minimum,” Claire confirmed, meeting his gaze directly. “No cell service once the storm takes out the satellite. No way down the mountain until county plows clear the access road, which won’t be a priority compared to major highways and emergency routes.”