FROSTBITE | S. Rogers/B. Barnes (FINISHED)

Freezing

Janie always thought that darkness was defined simply by the absence of light. 

She didn't think darkness meant anything more than that, but it did. Darkness, true, unrelenting darkness was bone-chilling, cold, and grim. It meant the lack of any perception of depth and passage of time, not to mention it felt more lonely and threatening than anything she had ever experienced.

Even though night fell every day, people were never truly consumed by darkness. There was always a streetlight somewhere flooding in through poorly shut curtains, headlights of passing cars shining brightly in the middle of a blacked-out road, or the neon numbers of alarm clocks on nightstands casting a colorful glow on walls.

Janie's vocal cords had given up on her by the end of the first day. She'd screamed relentlessly with all the power she could muster, begging anyone that might be able to hear her for help to no avail. She could feel that the entire right side of her face was caked with blood, and she remembered the feeling of the cold, metal blade which had so smoothly sunken into her previously unscathed skin. 

She didn't know what time it was, but every minute that slowly trickled by felt like an eternity. No matter how long Janie sat inside the metal chair, bound painfully tightly by her ankles and wrists, her eyes never fully adjusted to the chilling darkness. She could vaguely see the outline of a gurney, a long sheeted table, and a metal dresser with six drawers of which the contents were unbeknownst to her, but that was it. Nobody had been inside the room with her for over a period of twenty-four hours at least, leaving not only her stomach growling and her throat begging for water, but also desperate to use the bathroom.

The only time any sort of light would dare invade the room was when one of the men would come inside and even though the dim light bulb swinging on a string in the hallway offered a little bit of comfort, it also meant someone was coming and that was something she did not look forward to.

The questions came first, and when answers failed to come, the beating started.

Men (she assumed they were men) hidden behind masks black as night tried their hardest to beat answers out of Janie until she either passed out or wished she had, bruising her limbs and crushing her ego into oblivion.

"Where does he keep the money?"

"What's the combination to the safe?"

"How much money does he have stashed?"

Janie loved her parents, but their relationship was strained. Born and raised in Sacramento, it seemed as if both Janie's mom and dad were always working. Dad worked in IT as a developer of sorts (she never truly understood what he did) while her mom worked as an intensive care nurse. Both of them were sometimes out of the house for up to twenty hours at a time, either working night shifts or while Janie was at school.

The two of them had high-demand jobs and worked around the clock. Janie would spend most of her days at daycare when she was a baby, but eventually, the Adams hired a nanny to take care of their daughter while they were away.

Her father was never one to talk much about what he did and the older Janie got, the more she began to see what his job had made him out to be. He'd come home sometimes in the middle of the night, pissed drunk, or high on speed - apparently it helped him focus for hours at a time. 

Things were manageable at first. Janie tried to focus on getting through middle school as best she could, while her mom continued to pick up shifts left and right to stay away from her husband as much as possible. It wasn't like she didn't love him, he just didn't know what to do with himself. The family hid their problems from peers. While Janie excluded herself from her classmates, her mother distanced herself from coworkers. Neither of them wanted anyone to know about the struggles they faced at home.

High school was when the cracks of their little broken family truly began to peak through. Her father had given up drinking because his wife pushed him to, but the drugs remained a part of his life, of his job. He didn't just stick to speed, either. To be frank, Janie wouldn't be surprised if there was a drug left he hadn't tried at least once. 

Neither his wife nor his daughter knew that Neil didn't just do drugs; he also dealt them. Janie never wondered how he could afford to send her off to NYU without as much as the blink of an eye and his wife never questioned the car he bought her for her fiftieth birthday until she finally found one of his baggies, still filled to the brim with pearly white powder hidden under one of the sofa cushions, along with a brown paper bag that held close to twenty thousand dollars worth of dope money in hundred dollar bills.

They divorced two months after that.

Janie always tried to stay in contact with her dad - and not just because he paid off her college tuition upfront, but because she truly loved him and only wanted what was best for him. She knew he still did drugs, hell even he knew she knew he did drugs and her biggest fear had always been to watch him slowly kill himself.

Getting abducted by scorned distributors and tortured to death on his behalf had not been at the top of her list of scenarios to be worried about.

And yet here she was, her butt sore from the continuous sitting, her left cheek burning from tears running into the open wound and her right leg possibly broken. No, not possibly. Surely. As a pathology student, Janie knew a thing or two about broken bones. Her tibia? Snapped clean in half like a twig.

The tie wraps started to create friction with every movement she made, cutting deep into her wrists whenever she wiggled them around to relieve the constant pressure. Her stomach stopped growling now and instead, acid reflux made its way up to the back of her throat, begging for her to consume anything, anything at all to settle the burn left in its wake.

She didn't know what the point of all of this was. She'd never known her father had a safe, nor did he ever let in on how much money he had. Janie had never touched drugs herself (except for that one time in her freshman year of college when her friend Justine convinced her to take a drag of a joint), and she sure as shit had never touched his tainted money. She'd tried to tell them that, had screamed it at the top of her lungs, croaked it after her voice had broken down to a mere whisper, and cried until she couldn't cry anymore when they wouldn't believe her.

"Last chance," The tall, muscular one of the bunch sneered, "What's the combination to the safe, Adams? I'm not asking you again."

Janie tried her hardest to keep her eyes open. She was tired, so tired, but every time she tried to sleep, her captor would come into the room and ask more questions she didn't have answers to. She couldn't believe she'd gone from being a boring college student to being locked in a pitch-black basement, with no way of knowing anyone was even looking for her. On top of it all, her sickness only seemed to have gotten worse. High stress levels combined with the lack of proper nutrition caused Janie to feel worse with each passing hour.

The man groaned in frustration, before turning on his heel and marching towards the steel door. Before exiting the room, he offered one last look over his shoulder towards the deteriorating woman in his chair. 

"Remember that little video we made together? Well, let's just say you're fucking news, baby."

The last thing Janie heard before finally passing out, was the sound of her captor, laughing menacingly as he pulled the door shut behind him.