Content warning: This article contains references to suicide.
It was 5am, and she was heading for the station.
"I was numb at that point," she says.
"I was just so done with trying to survive and just existing… feeling extremely lonely and isolated and didn't know where to turn."
She was trapped in a cycle of addiction, gambling all hours and taking cocaine for the maximum buzz.
"I sat at the train station thinking about my daughter, thinking about the mistakes that I've made in the past, thinking that I didn't want to live this life any more."
Kiki was waiting for the first train.
But that train was late. And she changed her mind.
Instead of taking her own life, she decided to seek help.
Yet what she would find on that journey of recovery would shock her.
"I just realised that there wasn't anybody that looked like me, sounded like me, and it got me to thinking, well I can't be the only black woman suffering with a gambling or cocaine addiction."
Racial disparities
Research has shown that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to gamble than white people, but are more likely to suffer harm from gambling.
Despite that, too often they do not seek help.
And YouGov statistics shared exclusively with Sky News shed a light on why.
The survey of 4,000 adults for GamCare, which runs the National Gambling Helpline, found that two-thirds of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who'd gambled in the past year had spent more money than they'd planned, double the amount of white respondents.
They were also more than twice as likely to hide their gambling and nearly three times as likely to feel guilt.
Kiki is not surprised.
"For me, coming from a black community, a black background, what goes on indoors stays behind closed doors," she says.
"You keep your mouth shut, and you handle your business yourself."
And when she considered what an addict looked like, it wasn't someone like her.
"I just thought it's an old white man's thing - that they go into the bookies, and they have a drink and they bet.
"I thought, well, that's not me."
But Dharmi Kapadia, a senior sociology lecturer from Manchester University, who focuses on racial inequality, thinks there's more than just cultural pressure at play.
"These explanations of stigma have become dominant," she says.
"We've found that what's more important is that people don't want to go and get help from gambling services because of previous racist treatment that they've suffered at the hands of other statutory services, for example, when they went to the GP."
'I needed to change'
The stigma felt very real for Kiki, so she hid what she was doing.
"I've had trauma in my life. I've been sexually abused as a child.
"As the years have gone on, a traumatic event happened in my family that really changed the dynamics of my life and that's when I moved on from scratch cards to online slots."
She became hooked - betting around the clock, spending her benefits on 10p and 20p spins on online slots and borrowing money from those around her.
Eventually her daughter moved out when she was 15.
"That's when everything escalated. I didn't have that responsibility of keeping up appearances.
"Before that, gas, electric, food shopping, all those things had to be in place.
"I just lived and breathed in my bedroom at that point and yeah, it was very lonely."
When Kiki left the station that day, she called the National Gambling Helpline.
"For the first time in my life, I was completely honest about everything that I was doing - the lies, the manipulation when I was in active addiction, the secrecy.
"I was completely transparent because I wanted to change. I needed to change."
'Where's all the women?'
Since then, she has undergone constant therapy, including a six-week stint in rehab.
And as she headed home in the taxi, her phone rang.
It was Lisa Walker, a woman who understood gambling addiction. She had won £127,000 playing poker at 29 before losing everything and ending up homeless with her young children.
When she finally asked for help, she too felt she was different, walking into a Gamblers Anonymous meeting to find she was one of only two women in a room with 35 men.
"I was thinking, where's all the women?" says Lisa.
"I can't be the only woman in the world with a gambling addiction, so that got me thinking, what services are out there for women?"
It was the catalyst to set up support for female gamblers in April 2022.
Since then, Lisa has helped close to 250 women, but all but four have been white.
One of those four was Kiki.
'There's no getting away from it'
"It just baffles me… Why aren't they reaching out for support? Is it the shame? Is it stigma?" says Lisa.
But another concern is that it's simply too easy to hide the gambling.
"Getting on the train this morning, 90% of people are on their phones, and we don't know whether they're playing slots," she says.
"I could probably sit here now and sign up for 50 online casinos and probably get over a thousand free spins.
"I just think there's no getting away from it because it's 24 hours a day."
Kiki's flat in Woolwich, where once she couldn't even go to the bathroom without gambling, has become the place where she runs her own online peer mentoring groups.
"Feeling understood and validated for your experiences, for how you was raised… the core beliefs that you're taught from a young age, to have somebody that looks like you, talks like you, has the same cultural background… it's extremely important to make you feel understood, to make you feel validated," she says.
'You can learn from it'
Kiki will need to attend support groups for life to keep her addictions at bay.
But she has a clear goal, just as Lisa did.
"My focus is to help other people, help empower other people to choose themselves, to show them that there is light after so much darkness… that you don't have to be a victim of your circumstances, that you can choose to grow from it and learn from it and heal from it," she says.
For Kiki, there was so much at stake.
"It was either I was going to die or I was going to become a woman and a mother that my daughter could come back to and respect again."
And that has happened. Kiki's daughter is 19 now.
"We've got an amazing relationship today. I've took full accountability for the mistakes that I've made.
"She's extremely proud of where I am today."
It's more than Kiki could have dreamt of two years ago.
Now all she wants is to help others escape the endless cycle of addiction.
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
To speak to an adviser on the National Gambling Helpline, call 0808 8020 133
Ibrahim came to the UK two years ago on a tourist visa - then claimed asylum.
In the time he's been waiting to have his claim processed, he's met his partner Yvonne, who is English, and five weeks ago their baby daughter Alisha was born.
But his asylum claim remains unresolved, and he says he can't return to his home near Hebron in the West Bank because of his political activism.
"I can't just be stuck like this," he says. "I can't just waste day after day of my life waiting for somebody to say 'OK, we give you a decision'."
He wants to move on with his life and be allowed to work, he says.
"I don't think you need two years to process any asylum claim. I don't think there's any case that's complicated to that level. I'm not single any more. I've got other responsibilities now."
'I'd be happy to join hotel protests'
Formerly a farmer in the Golan Heights, Ibrahim says he's well aware of the shifting public mood over immigration and shares frustration over the money being spent on asylum seekers.
"I don't think they are putting their anger toward the right group," he says. "On many occasions, I spoke with a lot of them - the people who were protesting by the hotel.
"I said 'if you are really angry and if you really want to save your country, I will be more than happy to come with you and let's go together to protest'."
Ibrahim says he stayed in three Home Office-funded asylum hotels and claims at one point he got scabies.
He claims the food and conditions were so bad at one point, he left and slept on the streets.
Huge backlog of asylum claims
Meanwhile, the National Audit Office (NAO), the UK's independent public spending watchdog, has published a study on the processing and costs of people claiming asylum, examining the causes of delays and inefficiencies.
It analysed a sample of 5,000 asylum claims lodged almost three years ago and found 35% of them have so far been granted, while 9% of the claimants have been removed from the UK.
But the claims of more than half - 56% - remain unresolved.
Ruth Kelly, NAO chief analyst, says ministers have tended to take "short-term reactive interventions to fix problems, but then these have led to other pressures forming elsewhere in the system and new backlogs forming".
"That's led to wasted funds, poor outcomes for asylum seekers, and harm to the government's ability to meet its obligations to citizens."
The NAO estimates in the last year the Home Office and Ministry of Justice spent nearly £5bn on asylum - more than £2bn of that on asylum hotels.
It says there is a lack of a "whole system" approach within the Home Office; no shared objectives and there needs to be more robust shared data.
The NAO said it found the Home Office's effectiveness and value for money are being undermined because of fundamental barriers that mean people seeking asylum spend extended periods waiting in the system.
Read more on Sky News:
Asylum seeker taxi ban
Rise in asylum seekers in hotels
How immigration system is changing
The government has announced a raft of new measures to overhaul the asylum system but the watchdog points out they will take time and parliamentary approval to introduce.
In November, the home secretary acknowledged some people who are coming to the UK are economic migrants seeking to abuse the system, with even genuine refugees passing through other safe countries searching for the most attractive place to seek refuge.
Government vows to 'restore order'
With asylum claims falling across Europe but rising in the UK, the government says it wants to reduce illegal migrant arrivals and increase the removal of people with no right to be in the UK.
A Home Office spokesperson said the home secretary "recently announced the most sweeping changes to the asylum system in a generation to deal with the problems outlined in this report.
"We are already making progress - with nearly 50,000 people with no right to be here removed, a 63% rise in illegal working arrests and over 21,000 small boat crossing attempts prevented so far this year.
"Our new reforms will restore order and control, remove the incentives which draw people to come to the UK illegally and increase removals of those with no right to be here."
In the deep blue waters of the Caribbean, visible from space, an unremarkable grey smudge.
But this is the USS Gerald R Ford: the largest, most deadly aircraft carrier in the world. And it is only part of an armada, apparently set on Venezuela.
From being able to count on one hand the number of warships and boats in the Caribbean, since August we can see the build-up of the number, and variety of ships under US command.
And that's only at sea - air power has also been deployed, with bombers flying over the Caribbean, and even along the Venezuelan coast, as recently as this week.
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro told crowds his country has endured 22 weeks of aggression from the US and Donald Trump.
Things could be about to get worse.
So let's rewind those 22 weeks to understand how we got here…
'Drug boat' strike
On 2 September, the White House posted on X that it had conducted a strike against so-called "narcoterrorists" shipping fentanyl to the US, without providing direct evidence of the alleged crime.
Sky's Data & Forensics unit has verified that in the past four months since strikes began, 23 boats have been targeted in 22 strikes, killing 87 people.
Read more: The US-Venezuela crisis explained
The latest was on 4 December, after which US Southern Command announced it had conducted another strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific.
It was the first such strike since 15 November and since the defence secretary, sometimes referred to as secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, came under scrutiny for an alleged "second strike" in an earlier attack.
The US says it carried out the action because of drugs - and there has been some evidence to support its assertion.
The Dominican Republic said it had recovered the contents of one boat hit by a strike - a huge haul of cocaine.
Legal issues
Whatever the cargo, though, there are serious, disputed legal issues.
Firstly, it is contested whether by designating the people on the boats as narcoterrorists, it makes them lawful military targets - or whether the strikes are in fact extra judicial murders of civilians at sea.
And more specifically… well, let's go back to that very first video, of the very first strike.
What this footage doesn't show is what came afterwards - an alleged "second strike" that targeted people in the water posing no apparent threat.
That has created a crisis for Hegseth.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting last week, the defence secretary said he did not see that there were survivors in the water when the second strike was ordered and launched in early September, saying that "the thing was on fire".
And the 4 December strike shows this strategy isn't over.
The strikes are just part of the story, as warships and planes have headed toward the region in huge numbers.
Drugs or oil?
Some have said this isn't about drugs at all, but oil.
Venezuela has lots - the world's largest proven reserves.
Speaking to the faithful on Fox News, Republican congresswoman - and Trump supporter - Maria Salazar said access to Venezuela would be a "field day" for American oil companies.
And Maduro himself has taken up that theme. A few days later, he wrote this letter to OPEC - which represents major oil producing nations - to "address the growing and illegal threats made by the government of the United States against Venezuela".
That's how Maduro has framed this - a plan by the US "to seize Venezuela's vast oil reserves… through lethal military force".
Lethal military force - an understatement when you think of the armada lying in wait.
And it may be called upon soon. Trump on Tuesday said he's preparing to take these strikes from international waters on to Venezuelan territory.
Maduro has complained of 22 weeks of "aggression". There may be many more to come.
Additional reporting by Sophia Massam, junior digital investigations journalist.
The Data X Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
He died on Tuesday following a "tragic accident" while watching the Ukrainian military test a new weapon away from the frontline, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.
Hostile fire is not thought to have been involved.
The Sun newspaper reported that the serviceman was in the Special Forces. An MoD spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the claim and the individual's rank and service have not yet been revealed.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey paid tribute to him.
"My deepest sympathy and condolences to the family of the member of our Armed Forces who sadly lost their life today," Sir Keir said.
"Their service and sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Mr Healey said he was "devastated by the death of a UK service person in Ukraine.
"My thoughts are with their family, friends and colleagues as they grieve for a loved one. Our hearts go out to them."
The UK has previously acknowledged the presence of a small number of service personnel in Ukraine who are helping the Ukrainian military, as well as providing security for the British ambassador and other diplomats at the embassy in Kyiv.
There are also British troops who have been giving medical training.
Dozens of former British troops, as well as foreign fighters from many other countries, have travelled to Ukraine to fight for the Ukrainian armed forces ever since Russia launched its full-scale war almost four years ago.
A number of them have been killed in battle.
But this is the first time a serving member of the military has died.
"It is with deep regret that we must announce that a member of the UK Armed Forces died in Ukraine this morning, Tuesday 9 December," the MoD said in a statement.
"He was injured in a tragic accident whilst observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability, away from the front lines."
It was not immediately clear whether the accident happened on the same day that he died. The location where it occurred has also not been confirmed.
The serviceman's family has been notified.
Shines a light on UK military's role
The death shines a rare light on the little-discussed work of the UK military inside the country.
Very little is said about the mission amid concerns that Russia could exploit the discrete UK presence to falsely claim that serving British soldiers are actively fighting against Russian troops.
Read more on Sky News:
'Cheap ceasefire - expensive peace'
Putin 'ready for more war'
The first confirmed death of a serving member of the British armed forces confirms the significant risks they are taking.
But the Kremlin will also likely seize on the tragedy to amplify bogus claims about NATO forces already being deployed in Ukraine, fighting directly against Russia.
At the end of the 45-minute interview with Politico, EU leaders might be forgiven for thinking, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
"Europe doesn't know what to do," Trump said, "They want to be politically correct, and it makes them weak."
On the contrary, I would imagine some choice words were being uttered in European capitals as they waded through the string of insults.
First up, the US president criticised European leaders for failing to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
"They talk but they don't produce. And the war just keeps going on and on," he said.
The fact that the Russians have shown no real commitment to stopping the invasion they started is not mentioned.
Instead, the blame is laid squarely at the feet of Ukraine and its allies in Europe.
"I think if I weren't president, we would have had World War III," Trump suggested, while concluding that Moscow is in the stronger position.
Critics claim that the White House has emboldened the Kremlin and brought Putin in from the cold with a summit and photo opportunities.
Trump highlights the fact that his return to office forced many European NATO members to increase defence spending drastically.
On this, he is correct - the growing insecurity around how long America can be relied on has brought security into sharp focus.
The release of the new US national security strategy has only added to the feelings of unease.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday claimed some of its contents were unacceptable from a European point of view.
"I see no need for America to want to save democracy in Europe. If it was necessary to save it, we would manage it on our own," he told a news conference in Rhineland-Palatinate, the German state where Trump's paternal grandfather was born.
The leader of the EU's biggest power also said that the new US strategy was not a surprise and largely chimed with the vice president's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February.
For this reason, Merz reiterated that Europe and Germany must become more independent from America for their security policies.
However, he noted, "I say in my discussions with the Americans, 'America first' is fine, but America alone cannot be in your interests."
For his part, while Trump said he liked most of Europe's current leaders, he warned they were "destroying" their countries with their migration policies.
He said: "Europe is a different place, and if it keeps going the way it's going, Europe will not be…in my opinion, many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer. Their immigration policy is a disaster".
He added: "Most European nations... they're decaying."
Read more:
Analysis: Putin preparing for more war, not less
White House: Europe 'unrecognisable in 20 years or less'
Again, the comments echoed his security strategy, which warned immigration risked "civilisation erasure" in Europe.
There's no doubt immigration is a major concern for many of the continent's leaders and voters.
However, irregular crossings into the EU fell 22% in the first 10 months of 2025 according to Frontex, a fact which seems to have passed the president and his team by.
"Within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European", his security document warned.
It also suggested "cultivating resistance" in Europe "to restore former greatness" leading to speculation about how America might intervene in European politics.
Trump appeared to add further clarification on Tuesday, saying while he did not "want to run Europe", he would consider "endorsing" his preferred candidates in future elections.
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This comment will also ruffle feathers on the continent where the European Council President has already warned Trump's administration against interfering in Europe's affairs.
"Allies do not threaten to interfere in the domestic political choices of their allies," Antonio Costa said on Monday.
"The US cannot replace Europe in what its vision is of free expression… Europe must be sovereign."
So, what will happen now, and how will Europe's leaders respond?
If you are hoping for a showdown, you will likely be disappointed.
Like him or loathe him, Europe's leaders need Trump.
They need the might of America and want to try to secure continued support for Ukraine.
While the next few days will be filled with politely scripted statements or rejections of the president's comments, most of his allies know on this occasion they are probably best to grin and bear it.