The trek back to the clinic took hours, and Bond could feel the cold arctic wind beginning to take its toll. His body tremored as he shivered, his muscles trying desperately to keep warm. His legs and feet were sore from walking, and he was exhausted from the events that had occurred earlier that day. Relief finally came when he sat in the gondola leading away from the clinic and back to the small town below. After the short few minutes of rest, he stood reluctantly when the gondola reach the end of the track and followed the group of skiers he had shared the small space with out into the lodge. Now, all he had to do was find out where the hell this Hotel Horatio was.
"Entschuldigung, wo ist Hotel Horatio?" he asked the pale man standing at the front desk.
"Es ist weiß Straßen von hier. Gehen aus der Tür und gehen abbiegen," the man replied, his eyes not even looking up from his work.
"Danke," Bond said before heading out of the lodge and back into the cold Austrian air. His breath formed clouds of water droplets before him, and the familiar beginnings of shivers hit him once again. But in what seemed like the blink of an eye compared to the long journey he had made earlier that day, he found himself standing on the front steps of the small Hotel Horatio.
Upon opening the door, Bond's first impression of the hotel was that it seemed quite homely. The old lamps with colorful glass shades sitting low on antique furniture gave the hotel a sort of comforting atmosphere. But as peaceful and quiet as the hotel seemed, Bond still felt as if something was wrong. Deciding that it was only the exhaustion and effects of the cold talking, he brushed the feeling off as nothing and decided to start the search for room twelve.
It took him only a few minutes to find the hallway where Q's room was located, and he counted the rooms out loud as he walked down the corridor. "Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and…" When approached the door of room twelve, the same feeling of dread returned as quickly as it had gone. Though this time, Bond could have sworn he felt his stomach drop when he saw the cause of it. The door of room twelve was slightly ajar, and it swung ominously open when Bond gave it a small testing push.
He pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and cautiously entered the room. The room felt much different to Bond than the rest of the hotel. A unnerving chill filled the air around him as he walked through the threshold. He followed the slight breeze with his eyes back to its source. Moving towards the other side of the room, he saw that the window had been shattered, the broken glass littering the ground around it. A trail of blood led Bond back across the room to the bathroom, where he saw the door had seemingly been ripped violently off its hinges. Inside the small bathroom, he found Q's laptop sitting unceremoniously in the sink, destroyed. He guessed Q had sabotaged it himself in an attempt to keep sensitive information, most likely Bond's location, away from his kidnappers. Bond let his arms fall to his sides as a feeling of guilt overcame him.
This was all his fault.
He was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he didn't even notice the dark figure move behind him in the mirror. Bond only looked up a fraction of a second before he felt an acute pain in the back of his head and the world went black around him.