Hero (Tom Hiddleston)

6

"We are all in absolute heart-break over the loss of April. But I know she'd be so proud of all of you. And I know she would think that losing her life was so much more than worth it in order for the rest of you to be freed. She's with Jesus now, and the rest of you have been given the opportunity to live again. Go, do that, and do it for April."

The woman, April's mother, was crying by the time she stepped down from the front of the room. Most of them were too. Shae certainly was.

April had been one of the girls who hadn't been sold into it. She hadn't run away or been date-raped or anything. She'd simply been walking home from her after-school job one evening, and they'd picked her up off the street. She'd also been the newest out of all of them, and one of the youngest at seventeen, the same age as Shae. It'd only been a month since she'd been taken, so with the Amber Alert still relatively fresh, when they'd found her body, left in a motel room after having been shot, it was easy or them to identify her.

That night, the police had been one-by-one successfully picking up the girls they hadn't gotten before, and obviously, word had somehow gotten to whoever was with April, and he'd decided to take her life and leave her for the cops to find.

Shae didn't understand why it had to be April. She had been the only one out of all of them that had retained any fire, any joy. No, she wasn't the innocent, care-free girl she'd been when they'd kidnapped her, but she was always hopeful, and she never gave up. She'd always promised them that they'd all get out some day. None of them had believed her. But she'd been right... about all of them except herself.

It wasn't fair, Shae thought bitterly. April had a family who loved her, a family who hadn't ever stopped looking for her in the month she'd been gone. She'd had the fire and passion left to still make a life for herself. But now she was gone.

Why couldn't it have been her instead? She had no one left who cared about her... her mother was dead. She had no siblings. Her father, the love of her life, was also dead. And her aunt and uncle, her only living relatives, had sold her into that living hell. She'd never be able to show her face around the church again, and they were the only people in the world that might even dare to care about her still. There was no reason for her to still be breathing, and yet April was the one who was dead.

The service didn't last much longer. April's friends and relatives from before went to a reception, but none of the other girls who were left felt like doing the same, so they went back out to the police cars that had brought them, and they were taken back to their rooms.

Without April, there had been thirteen of them, and now there were only six left. The other seven had either runaway and regretted doing so now, or had been kidnapped or date-raped. They'd been sent home after the two-week long recovery program they'd all been put through. A week after that had ended, the rest of them were still stuck, having no idea where to go or what to do. They'd sent Shae, the only one left who was under eighteen, back to school, but she was still living in the room she'd been given that first night, and that couldn't go on for much longer.

But what could they do with her? She was barely seventeen, still in the first semester of her junior year in high school. They could send the others to safe houses, give them funds for college, teach them how to be adults after everything they'd gone through. But she'd have to be put in the foster care system. And who on earth would want a seventeen-year-old who had been trafficked? Absolutely no one.

It wasn't a long drive back to the station. The other girls went back to the main room where they spent most of their time, but Shae didn't, because she never did. She went back to her room and sat down in the corner again.

She's always liked corners. She never liked to leave any side of her exposed, and this was the only way to get that. Even when she was a little kid, she'd always found a corner. She'd hardly ever misbehaved as a child, but when she did, her parents knew better than to put her in timeout. She'd enjoy the safety of the walls around her too much.