I had never wished for my child to be drawn in the reaping. I had never hoped for my little girl to enter the arena. I had never dreamed that my baby would be responsible for killing so many innocents.
I had no choice in the matter. The offspring of two previous victors held too much temptation, and on the day of her fifth birthday my gorgeous Clove was taken into training. I had to stand by as she was turned into something I had prayed I could protect her from.
I watched as she grew stronger and fitter. I watched as she was instructed in things that the young should know nothing about. I feigned delight when they thought to give her knives, the tools that had once been my weapon of choice.
I know, I am a terrible mother. Who would condemn their own flesh and blood to the killing fields of the Capitol? There is nothing I can say in my defence, only that it was better than the alternative. Perhaps if my husband had still been alive we could have put up a more successful fight, but on my own, reliant on my winnings from the game-makers for survival they stilled my hand. I had no other option. Either let her enter the arena, or let her die slowly from starvation before she even came of age.
On the day of the reaping she was excited, I could see it shimmering in her moss coloured eyes. She was wearing a brand new dress in the same shade of green as her eyes. Her long mahogany hair had been brushed until it shone, hanging down her back in cascading waves. She stood tall and proud with the older girls.
I knew it was coming, but nothing could prepare me for the moment when she volunteered to take the place of that petite blonde girl, shivering on the platform before everyone. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed to hold myself upright, as my legs trembled with such ferocity I was sure it was visible to all. Bile rose in my throat, I had to swallow continuously to keep the water within my stomach, I had been unable to face any actual food this morning.
I withheld my tears as others congratulated me. As I farewelled my only child I explained them away as happiness. Moments before she left I slipped the bracelet from my wrist, tucking the woven threads into her hand. "Your grandmother gave me this, right here in this very room, nineteen years ago today," I murmured, as she was tugged gently from my arms and led onto a train bound for a place so unlike our own.
Those following weeks were the hardest of my life, watching her parading through the capitol, seeing her scores read on the television. Watching her chase and maim and kill. Disgust and horror filled me as I saw what they had turned her into.
The day she died I didn't cry, I couldn't. I was simply frozen. People banged at my door continuously throughout the day, as my mind replayed the images from the screen; my child, my baby, my daughter simply crumpling to the ground.
They shipped her back in a steel coffin. She wasn't wearing my bracelet. She had never worn it. The mayor had sent her to her death with some sort of ring, that the game-makers had deemed inappropriate. She hadn't been allowed to take the ring into the arena, she entered with no token.
It must have been divine intervention. My punishment for the atrocities I committed in that same arena. No god could overlook such evil. It seemed fitting, retribution in kind. That which gave me the chance to conceive my darling baby, took her away with an insulting ease.
From the day of my return I have avoided talking of my own games, but now the time has come. From she who survived, this is the story of the fifty-fifth Hunger Games.
The odds were in my favour. Well, they were then.