She woke to white.
White ceiling. White walls. White light filtering through floor-to-ceiling windows that framed a landscape so startlingly alien that for a long, disoriented moment, Jane was certain she was still dreaming.
Snow. As far as she could see. A vast, flat, blinding whiteness broken only by dark treelines in the far distance and a steel-grey sky pressing down above them like a lid. Silence of the profound kind — not the absence of sound so much as the presence of it, the deep, total quiet of a frozen world.
She was in a bed. A very large bed, with white linen that felt expensive and a duvet so thick she'd been cocooned in warmth despite the cold outside the window. She was still wearing her own clothes — the jeans and cream jumper she'd put on that Sunday morning. Someone had removed her shoes and placed them neatly at the foot of the bed.
The neatness of it was, somehow, more disturbing than anything else.
Jane sat up. Her head ached with the distant, padded throb of something pharmaceutical wearing off. She looked at the room: massive, minimalist, expensive in the muted, self-assured way of a space that didn't need to announce itself. Dark wood floors. A fireplace — lit, warm. Heavy curtains in charcoal grey, currently pulled back. A door to what appeared to be a bathroom. Another door, presumably an exit, which Jane focused on with the focused desperation of someone doing a very specific kind of maths.
She was across the room in three seconds flat.
Locked. Naturally.
"Of course it's locked," she said aloud to the empty room, in a voice that she was grateful didn't shake. "Of course. Because nothing about this situation could possibly be straightforward."
She went to the window. No latch. The glass was thick — triple-glazed at minimum, she guessed, given the cold outside. The drop to the ground below was at least two storeys, and the ground, when she could make out its contours beneath the snow, appeared to be solid stone.
Fine. No immediate escape. She was in a very cold, very foreign-looking country, possibly Russia, in a room she couldn't get out of, wearing yesterday's clothes, with a headache and no phone and no shoes.
Jane Williams took a breath. And then she sat back down on the edge of the bed, pressed her hands flat on her thighs, and began to think.
She was still thinking — methodically, carefully, cataloguing what she knew and what she needed — when the door opened.