She was raised to kill. It was a part of her very being. It was one of her defining attributes. But it wasn't all she was.
She was the little girl with eyes as big and dark as the night sky.
She was the child in the back of the class who had a hard time making friends.
She was her father's raven.
She was the girl at the training center who feared no one, not even the big boy with the sword.
She was the girl who took the record for knife throwing in her district.
She was the only girl to volunteer for the 74th hunger games, because no one else had the nerve to go up against the boy with the sword, Cato Demetrius.
She saved a twelve year old child from certain death.
There was no denying she was as twisted as the knives she jerked into her opponent's stomachs. But there was something else there too. There always is.
And as she pinned the girl on fire to the ground, fully prepared to slaughter the other child, (for that's what they all really were) she wondered if this girl's father had a nickname for her, if she was in love with a boy everyone feared. She wondered if this Katniss Everdeen had friends, unlike herself.
For the first time ever Clove wondered about her victim's life. She supposed it was the effect the girl had on everyone, she brought out the humanity in people. It was why she needed to be killed.
These thoughts were fleeting, and quickly replaced with the wall Clove had learned long ago to place in her mind. The girl on fire became just another warm body, from which blood begged to be spilt.
She never got the chance.
With the cornucopia cold against her back and Thresh's hands tight around her neck, Clove died. Calling out the name of a boy so submerged in this twisted game they had jumped at the chance to participate in.
She would regret never killing the Everdeen girl.
She would regret never telling Cato.
She would regret taking children's lives instead of living her own.
She would regret, regret, regret, making the sadistic choice to take on this title of career.
She regrets having her conscience surface in her very last moments; it's easier to die believing everything you did was justified.