ILARIA (book 3)

16. ASAHI

It genuinely surprised me how much evil is in the world.

I walk into the office at the safe house, pulling my bulletproof vest off and just sitting at the desk. I put my head in my hands, closing my eyes.

We just saved so many young girls from being trafficked.

For the past month I've been working with an organisation that helps support, relocate and reunite victims of sex trafficking. This is my placement work, usually agents don't do it until later in their career but dad said it was a brilliant opportunity for me.

I'm here for 5 more months, but I honestly cannot wait until I can go home back to Chicago and return to my normal duties.

The trafficking is taking a toll on me.

The door opens and one of the organisations leaders, Xena, walks in. She looks at me. "It gets difficult."

I stay quiet.

"It's not weak to be hurt by what you see. It genuinely is just.... horrible." She sits on the couch.

"I'm fine." I say, but my voice betrays me and cracks, revealing that I wasn't fine.

The door opens again and dad walks in. "Xena, give us a minute, yeah?"

Xena rubs my shoulder before walking away. Dad locks the door and pulls the curtains over to give me my privacy.

"The first time I worked with sex trafficking, I couldn't sleep for days. I threw up looking at the case files..." He sits on the couch. "I had been purely working on homicide and drugs back then, so when I was transferred and the first case I was given was the most prolific case of rape I had ever heard... it made me so sick."

I lean back, wiping the wetness from my cheeks.

"And then I kept working and I realised that it just gets worse. Two months in and I had my first case involving a missing young boy. We found him, barely, he was assaulted so much that his insides were completely ruined. I got a call four years after saying the boy took his own life because he couldn't deal with what had happened to him."

A tear rolls down my cheek again and I don't bother wiping it away.

"Even cases I weren't officially working. Your mom, I had five guys arrested for attempted rape after a halloween party she attended. It wasn't easy seeing her in the state that she was in."

"It's draining." My voice cracks again.

"You identified and saved 32 kids tonight, Asahi."

I look down. "At what cost? Half of those kids are gonna be scarred for life and scared of leaving their home. Some of them have life long trauma."

In the back of the ambulance, I was with a young girl. She was begging for the paramedics to kill her.

It pained me to hear the heartbreak in her voice. The pure agony as she ripped the cannula's from her arm and refused the oxygen mask.

She would've rather died than lived with what they had done to her.

And I saved her.

I made her live.

Live a life that she's now gonna hate.

"You'd rather them die?"

"I'd rather them not live in constant fear and anxiety. Their life's are ripped from them, dad."

"You don't think recovery is possible, Sahi?"

After seeing the state some of them were in.

I highly doubt it.