Preview

Like at least two of its wealthy guests, the Hotel Belmont was to have a short but soulful life expectancy. It was a chalet set into the Furka Pass of the Swiss Alps, a mountainside covered by the Rhona Glacier. The ice completely surrounded the chalet: opening up at the top to let in the fantastic Swiss weather, with its year-round winter wonderland, and climbing up and skiing down the mountain’s peak. To reach the hotel required followed a twisting road that skirted the cliffs of the mountain and was actually carved through the glacier itself to get to the Belmont—surely one of the most phenomenal tunnels in all of Europe.

In time, though—less than twelve years, by most accounts—global warming would catch up with the Belmont. The glacier that so impressively pressed in on it, soaring up on all sides and plummeting down to make constant war with the mountain’s roots, was shrinking now. It would one day be gone, leaving a view of only grainy, dusty rock; a vertical quarry instead of the majestic, natural ice sculpture visitors were now treated too. A heartache for the owners, to be sure, but for now, it gave a stay at the Belmont a bittersweet twinge that Caity Kildaire quite liked.

She was one of the two guests with a short life expectancy, which she was well aware of. It wasn’t that she took drugs, drank, or smoked. She was in pristine health, actually, as her garb took great care to show off. Her skintight cigarette pants showed off the long, well-developed legs that promised and delivered lifetimes of ecstasy to both the men and the women that found their way into her thighs’ grip. Her dinner jacket, the same metallic gray, was cinched with three buttons between her breasts. A good thing, too: if only for the wives present and not their husbands. Underneath the jacket, she wore a blouse as slender and as clear as the tissue paper inside a wrapped gift, its sheerness showing off the tops of her creamy breasts and, lower, the rippling muscles of her belly. All the way to her large metal belt buckle, the contrast continued: silky femininity and butch musculature. Her legs had runner’s muscles in their firm thighs, her arms were thickened with muscles, and her shoulders were broad in a way that almost took away from her womanhood, but could not manage to overcome the sweetness of her features and the curves that her athletic body held onto.

In a way, she matched the décor. The Hotel Belmont had a sugar and spice, complimentary nature: lush in its austerity, sprawling in its spartan space, old-fashioned and yet with modern convenience cheating its way through the understated carpets, the minimalist woodwork, the classical furniture. It was a setting meant for reflection, both inward and outward, providing merely a frame for the beauty of both the towering mountain outside and the gorgeous patrons inside. 

Caity emphasized more with the outside. An avalanche, perhaps, or the winter storms that shut down all climbing and forced guests inside, as in the novels of Agatha Christie. She was in the same line of work as Dame Christie: someone who figured out how to kill people for a living. She worked for the CIA as an eliminator and she wondered how the many who drooled after her body would feel to know that each muscle group was a weapon, all able to kill. From her lacquered fingernails to the feet in her polished dress shoes.