Frost Bite

Chapter 15

Jack

I look at the clock. It's ten in the morning and Josie still hasn't shown up for breakfast.

Which is awfully strange. Because in all the time that I've known her, Josie has never voluntarily skipped a meal, never slept long enough to even risk missing one.

Maybe she's sick? That's easily fixed if she is. I give Ryan a stern warning look, one that clearly tells him if he messes with my kitchen he'll end up with blue fingers and toes.

I head up the stairs, wondering why it is exactly that when I wake up in the morning – if I ever go to sleep that is – she's the first person I want to see.

I am turning into a stranger. This is a version of Jack I didn't think was possible.

"Josie?" I call and knock on her door, and I wonder what it would be like to –

No, I'm not going there.

"Josie?" I call her name again and this time there's a pitting in my gut that makes my chest tighten. "I'm opening the door. If you're naked, it's your own fault for not saying anything."

I open the door and I look into her room and it's completely empty.

I don't need to touch anything to know that the bed is room temperature – just like everything in here. Which means she hasn't been in here for a while.

Could she be in the basement? Hurt rattles around in my chest at the idea that she couldn't sleep last night and didn't come find me. Which is entirely irrational. I don't get hurt. Also, I was actually asleep last night, for once. And I know because I dreamed something that would never, ever happen.

Life isn't that nice.

"Josie?" I call for her in the basement, but the lights are off and it's cold. I close my eyes and reach out, but the only source of human heat I find in the entire house is Ryan.

I run up the stairs and stare at Ryan, who looks at me as though I've had a nervous breakdown. I won't be the only one in a minute.

"She's gone."

Josie

Every muscle in my body aches. There's something hammering away on the inside of my skull and I think, oh, God, Jack is going to kill me. Jack is going to kill me for pulling a Ryan and no one will ever find my body because Jack will make glaciers to cover it.

I also think, I am tied to a chair.

I pry my eyelids open to find that I am in a warehouse. Abandoned, seeing as there's frozen rat shit all over the place and snow covering the ground.

Jack is going to be so, so pissed.

"Good, you're awake," a voice says in a way that makes me think of French wine and cheese with unpronounceable names and German automobiles with too many zeroes on their price tags to be practical.

I turn toward the voice and the man behind it. He wars a suit and it's all firmly pressed lines and new material. It screams of money.

Also, vanity.

"Yes, I had a lovely nap, thank you," I say sarcastically. "Would you mind bringing me a robe and a hot towel, though?"

I know I'm doing exactly what Jack told me not to do if this were to happen. I know I should be playing the helpless little girl so I can catch them with their pants down. But, God I'm so mad I don't care what they do to me, I'm going to make life a living hell for them.