OOC: This chapter is more of a plot device, detailing incidents and all. Might be a bit boring. But please take the time to read. Thank you.

“Please, Director King. I beg of you. Please!!” Jaejoong bowed as low as he could while standing. “I need to know where she is. I have no idea what Aisha plans to do or where she plans to go. But I do know that it can be no good. Please, please tell me if you know anything about her.”

Michael leaned back into his chair, examining the younger man and tapping his fingertips together. After days of worrying, Jaejoong had finally mustered the courage to confront the only common acquaintance they had, the director of Avex Entertainment.  While he admired his spine, Michael wasn’t too eager to satisfy the boy’s entreaties.

“I don’t think I should be telling you anything that Miss Saint-Laurent didn’t see fit to tell you herself. That would be a violation of the confidence she places in me.”

“But, sir…” Jaejoong bit his lip in hesitation. Arguing with a man of his stature was spelling death for his career, but goddamn it.. “Aisha is in danger. You know from whom, and you know way more than she told me. Surely you agree these are extenuating circumstances…”

“Nontheless, Kim-san, I’m sure you will agree that even if I divulged her intentions or location, there is little you could do.” His persistence was staring to irk Michael a little. “And I don’t appreciate having my decision challenged in this manner. “

Suddenly Jaejoong was pissed. Throwing caution to wind, he exploded. “So what? Just because you are superior to me in corporate position, I’m going to stop trying to save the girl I love?” He noticed Michael’s untempered surprise. “That’s right, I love her. And maybe I’m trying to give her the affection she deserves, the kind you never saw fit to give her!”

“Kim-san! That’s enough!!”  Michael had very low tolerance for insubordination and disrespect. “You will leave my office this very instant, and take care to curb your words in future.”

“I most certainly will not!” Jaejoong didn’t know what fuelled him, but a certain warmth inside him kept his knees from collapsing. “You know as well as I do that Aisha was, and probably still is..” he added with a stab in his chest, “ madly in love with you. And while I would never blame you for refusing her, I do blame you for not helping me make her happy. For God’s sake,  sir, she hadn’t taken even a single whiff  of a cigarette while she was with me. Are you so blind that you cannot see that I can make her pain go away?”

Michael stared at the prince of Asian pop. The Prince Charming of the Japanese season. The man who took Senator Kawashiki’s daughter at the back of a Ferrari and escaped unscathed. The man who drove the heartthrob debutante Natsumi Mitsuzaki to suicide with a single “No”. And sighed. “And what about your pain?”

“What?” Jaejoong stared dumbly.

“Sit, Jaejoong.” The use of his first name startled him into obedience.

“Its not that I don’t want to see her happy. I want it with all my heart.” Suddenly Michael felt tired, as if he had aged, in a second a hundred years. He drew out a bottle of scotch and poured two helpings, pushing one towards Jaejoong. “Drink, you’ll need it for the story I’m about to tell you.” He obeyed again.

“Its not that I don’t love her. I always have. I was just..I still am too scared of what she will do to me.” He finished the scotch in one swallow and poured another. Jaejoong hastened to finish his before asking “What do you mean?”

“ You see, Kim-san, she was adopted when eight years old. Her earliest memory…” Michael took his second shot. “Her earliest memory is that of an afternoon when she returned from the playground. She went upstairs..” Jaejoong saw him clench his fists until his knuckles were white. “ and hearing noises from her parents’ room, she went inside without knocking..”

Michael was breathing hard now, as if in pain. Jaejoong grew concerned, “Director King, are you..?”

“She saw two men on her mother..” He burst out. “ her. And her father, standing over them, laughing while her mother groaned through the gag in . Aisha watched minutes of her being brutalised before her father noticed her, and when he came towards her, telling her to get out, she grabbed a knife that lay on the bureau by the door and plunged it into him. She..she told me she stabbed him about five times before the other men came at her. One of them swung a leg at her and that was the last thing she remembers.”

Michael stopped to take another drink, this time from the bottle itself.

“Somehow, the neighbors, hearing the commotion or something barged in and she was saved from murder.  The two men escaped, but her father was arrested. The knife has missed all his vital organs. In a highly publicised trial, he confessed that he owed money to those men, and let them have his wife in return for having those debts erased. Further inquiry revealed that he also promised them his daughter.” Michael’s hand squeezed the glass. “That bastard was going to let them have that little girl, let them take her to a whorehouse and sell her to monsters…”

Jaejoong felt sick. He felt bile clambering up his throat. Michael continued.

“Maharet, the matriarch of the Saint-Laurent family read of her in the papers and came forward to adopt her. Since then, she’s been a part of their empire. But that..that’s not the worst part…”

Jaejoong closed his eyes and moaned, trying to keep the bile down. He didn’t want to hear any more.

“Two years ago, while with the FBI, Aisha shot two men in a drug bust. But they were found not only with bullets in them. Aisha had beaten them to half-death with a tire iron. Broken their knees, their elbows, arms, legs, bashed their faces in beyond recognition. She claimed it was in self-defence, but she shot them…between their legs.”  He stopped, drained.

Jaejoong grabbed the bottle without bothering for permission or etiquette. “They were the two men she saw with…” he struggled to get the words out, “ her mother.”

“The family’s influence was enough to keep the incident discrete, and she resigned immediately. But that’s when it all started. The drugs, alcohol, the violence. More than once, she’s been arrested for vandalism and got into fights that left her opponent inches within death. I’ve repeatedly had to get her out of prison. I don’t know why, but my marriage seems to have calmed her down, until now.”

“She told me that her father is back, and trying to kill her, and that you told her of it.” Jaejoong was beginning to feel lightheaded now. All this information, about the woman he had just…was too much.

“Yes, my sources confirmed that it was indeed Conrad Aiken..that bastard’s name, you see, who hired the hit on her in the coffee shop and in her car that night. I know maybe I shouldn’t have told her, but I also know that there’s no way out of this for her. Aisha is going to suffer, so I figured, she might as well suffer for the truth.”

“But she doesn’t have to!” Jaejoong stood up again, slamming his hands on the table. “I can save her, Director King. I know I can. I just need to be with her, I just need to…” he closed his eyes, and breathed deep..  “I just need to show her that something does exist that is living for, and that is beautiful. What I..what I feel for her can be that. I know I will never be the man that you are to her, but I love her, Director King. I..” his voice dropped to an exhausted plea. “I love her. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted, and never known I’ve wanted. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted to cherished, strong with every strength I find lacking in myself, and weak with every vulnerability that I want to protect in her.” The look in his eyes startled Michael, it was so honest that he, a dealer in corporate lies, couldn’t recognise it. “I don’t even see her as a woman anymore, she’s just Aisha. Imperfect, clumsy, messed up, perfect, beautiful, Aisha.”

Michael felt his heart ache for the wreck of a man before him. Beneath face untouched by blemish he could finally see a heart wracked, beaten, bleeding. A heart dying. And he would be the one to strike the death blow.

“The medical reports on both Aisha’s father and mother, collected during the adoption process.” Michael pulled out a couple of files from his desk and placed them before Jaejoong. “I suggest you look through them if you doubt what I am about to say. Listen to me very carefully, Kim Jaejoong.” He leaned forward, locking his eyes into Joong’s “Aisha Rose Saint-Laurent is suffering from first-stage schizophrenia. A disease inherited genetically from bother her biological parents, aggravated especially in her father along with advanced psychosis which allowed his twisted mind to do what he did. He got the insanity plea, but Aisha will kill him now that he is in her life. And neither you nor I can stop her because she lacks the capacity to judge this particular matter with reason. Aisha’s schizophrenia is not strong enough to stop her from functioning normally, but it gives her absolutely no control over her anger which she often directs on those around her. If you or anyone, for that matter tries to stop her from doing what she is about to, Aisha will kill that person, and if she is unable to kill her father, she will kill herself. She has tried it before, and I am not about to let her try it again. I would rather see that monster, that spawn on Hell, that…filthy beast die than the girl who was my first friend at Harvard.”

He fell back to his chair, feeling like a tired, old man. Who knew simply speaking could take so much out of a man. “But she doesn’t have long.  Aisha’s condition will intensify, worsen until she is incapable of being a part of normalised society. Do you know what  happens then, Jaejoong?”

Jaejoong didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know anything anymore. But he had to.

“She will be institutionalised. Locked away into a psychiatric ward for the rest of her life. That, Kim Jaejoong is what we need to prepare for. There’s no saving her from that, and that is why I could never be a part of her life the way she wanted me to be. It would kill me to watch my girl being taken away to an asylum..” His voice broke. “If I let myself, I would love her so much that I wouldn’t know where she ended and where I negan. The way you love her now.”

Jaejoong saw the moisture glint in his eyes before he rose and abruptly made for the door.

“I am sorry, Kim Jaejoong,” He said, with his back to him. “You are in love with the wrong girl.”

Readers, you know who you are. And I love you all