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It takes three grown men to restrain her. It starts when Peeta gets close enough for her to slam her palms—shackles be damned—into his chest and hammer him into an urn. High and mighty Mellark crashes against the only decorative object in the room, chunks of porcelain shattering all over the tiles. He stumbles, providing Katniss with a clean shot and an opportunity to land a crescent kick to his profile, but that's when his backup swoops in. They clamp their grimy, loathsome paws on her arms and legs to and haul her away from him.
"You son of a—" She claws at the air, fights the good fight. By the end of it, bite marks brand Abernathy's skin, Heavensbee's flabby face has scratches, and Odair is nursing a classic but painful blow to the nuts.
Peeta straightens and cuts across the room. His whipcord frame halts inches from her, the coarse material of his grey shirt chafing her nightgown. His irises are coal black, not like the immense blue that she's used to. His proximity, however, rouses the scents of that one memory. A bakery, sugar glaze, and sacks of rye grain. Distrustful scents that penetrate the weaker part of her.
She and her nemesis fume at each other. Even with Abernathy's vice-like grip, Katniss tries to lurch toward Peeta in a last ditch effort to chomp his immaculate nose off.
Peeta doesn't flinch. Annoyance, bitterness, and, oddly, disappointment shadow his face.
"Well, you're a piece of work, aren't you?" he chides, his voice deadly calm.
Her nostrils flare. He hasn't seen anything yet.
He quirks an eyebrow and addresses his allies. "Get her out of my sight. I'll deal with her later."
Later? She's Katniss Everdeen-Snow. No one deals with her later except her grandfather.
It also takes all three men to drag Katniss to her cell. "Coward!" she roars to Peeta, the words tolling through the halls. "You have these men do your dirty work? This is how the great Mockingjay deals with me? You're a cowaaaaaard, and I fucking hate youuuuu!"
"He doesn't care," Odair tells her.
"For Christ's sake, sweetheart. Shut up," Abernathy grunts.
She bites the mentor again. Her struggle buys her time to scan the perimeter. The corridor looks to be an underground tunnel painted a stale green, as cavernous and austere as the inside of a pipe, with a parade of more glaring industrial lights above. In her mind, she files away the number of rooms and adjacent halls they pass, including an infirmary, and the directions to her prison, which has a door that looks like it should be attached to a submarine. It's about six inches thick, and fat bolts trail across its frame.
One of the guards standing post outside the door is a boy no older than she is. He's tall and tickled pink to see her handcuffed. He smirks with pride at the bandage on her cheek, validation etched into his rugged and vaguely familiar face.
"Gale," Abernathy addresses the guard, motioning for him to open the door.
Ah-ha, Katniss thinks. Gale Hawthorne. District 12. Son of a coal miner. Peeta Mellark's best friend.
She'd studied the Mockingjay's file prior to the first Games, as she did with every tribute. Hawthorne and Mellark grew up together, their bond crossing the class divide of their puny district of merchants and Seam rats.
Hawthorne marches like a missile on legs as he thrusts open the cell door and steps aside, his gray eyes sharp on her. Abernathy shoves her inside the room. The instant she staggers to the center and regains her balance, the mentor pauses and looks down his nose at her. "You're mistaken. That boy knows exactly how to handle the likes of you. Just wait."
He retreats into the hall, with Odair close behind. The District 4 victor has developed a soulless gait, contrary to his usual swagger. She'd noticed that quickly, how he moves as if he's lost all motivation, as if it's been torn from him, as if he's lost something important—or maybe someone.
Unfortunately, Heavensbee remains in the cell. Thick lids sag over his eyes, giving him a placid look. Behind him, the Hawthorne boy leans against the doorframe, his gun cradled to his chest like he's showing it off, wanting her to see the weapon nice and clear.
Was Heavensbee the one who'd hit Katniss when they kidnapped her? Or had it been Hawthorne?
Heavensbee gestures to the wound on her cheek. "There was no need for that," he says, half-turning and projecting his voice so that Hawthorne will hear him.
No apology. Heavensbee's tone is gentlemanly and sophisticated, but he isn't sorry that she'd been hurt. Only that Hawthorne—now she knows it was that hothead who'd struck her—has made the rebels look barbaric.
"Is there a need for the handcuffs?" Katniss drawls, raising her wrists.
"We'll decide when they come off," Heavensbee replies, then departs the cell.
Meh. She can't fault him for that answer, considering she might be able to take him and Hothead Hawthorne on her own. The temperamental guard positions himself in the hall, standing opposite her cell and giving her a look that says, You and I aren't going anywhere.
The door groans closed, the bolts twisting in place on the other side. Katniss kills two mockingjays with one stone by treading the room like a caged tiger to blow off steam and assess her surroundings. Metal sheets for walls. A steel-barred window rather than an air vent. Zero cracks in the floor. A mattress thinner than a slice of bread, but no pillow or sheets or bed frame. Textbook precautions and spartan details that do little to fool her. She once had to break out of a simulated cell like this during training. An unembellished room is more conspicuous than these rebels would like to think.
They're watching her, listening to her tight breathing, measuring her vitals with devices she can't see. She knows how this works. They'll make her wait for days, starve her until the very sight of nightlock becomes a temptation, prevent her from sleeping by dousing her with ice cold water every hour. They'll wait until she's on the brink, ready to crawl out of her skin. They might light matches near her skin, close enough for her to feel the heat without being burned—a subtle but highly effective way to fray her nerves and keep her on edge. They might torture someone in front of her. They might do many things that she has seen done to others.
Katniss inhales, then exhales. She runs her palm along the wall, searching for a pulse, the buzzing line of energy, a flaw in their system. Hours go by as she checks every inch.
Nothing. Well fuck. For enemies, they aren't as stupid as she expected.
Or maybe they are, since at one point, Hawthorne grudgingly brings in a tray of lamb stew and a plastic cup of water. He mutters that she shouldn't get used to it. She wonders who would be dumb enough to nourish her so soon. The faded image of a bread loaf comes to mind, but she shakes it from her mind and kicks the provisions to the other side of the room.
Her hands itch to slap at the walls, but she rations her patience. She slumps onto the floor and whistles Peeta's signature tune, the one he learned from that Rue girl. She whistles over and over as the sun shifts in the window, night falls, and her voice scrapes at her throat. Yet she keeps whistling because, hahaha, he will hear it. He will hear her mocking the Mockingjay, until it's time for him to retire to his lair, and then he will hear Katniss invading his dreams.
Her. There. With him. In his bed.
kpkpkpkpkp
She's still whistling the next morning, when the door grinds open and Hothead Hawthorne enters with another guard. Silly her, she'd expected it to take days for an interrogation. She passes a critical eye over the second rebel, who stations himself on one side of the door, while Hawthorne stands on the other side.
Twelve seconds later, Peeta Mellark steps inside.
After a careful glance around the room, he casts the guards a satisfied nod. When they leave, shutting the door behind them, Peeta leans his shoulder against the wall and, like yesterday, crosses his arms over his chest. They stare at one another. Happily, Katniss continues to whistle, prepared to drill the tune into his ears until they burst. He glares down at her with such an intricate mix of hard and soft features. The downward slant of his lids, that fierce jaw like a weapon, those vivid blues and ridiculous lashes.
Peeta's mouth lifts into a victorious smirk that dilutes her confidence. Katniss realizes that she's stopped whistling. He'd done nothing to distract her, yet she stopped whistling.
Satisfied, he taps on the cuff around his wrist. The door opens. The bastard leaves.
Her throat hurts so badly. Her stomach roars with hunger. This time, a container of cheese buns is brought in, prompting another memory that makes her chest hitch—these have to be from Peeta. Is he trying to send a message? Make a point?
She tears the cheese buns into bits and tosses them out the barred window.
On his second visit, she chooses complete silence. The guards bring in a couple of chairs and force her to sit in one, but she makes a show of reclining in her seat, relaxing into her shackles, as though she's perfectly at home. Peeta sits in the other chair, across from her. They fall into another bruising staring contest.
"Do you know why you're here?" he asks.
"You've got the wrong person," she drawls, wondering how long she can drag out the bullshit, run her enemy in circles, and exhaust him.
He quirks a brow and plays along. "Do we, now? We're looking for a gamemaker by the name of Katniss Everdeen-Snow, whose suite you happened to be found lounging in, and who happens to have one of the most recognizable faces in this country." He squints. "You look a lot like her."
"I'm not her."
"You have her eyes."
"I'm not her."
"And you have her scowl. I think she inherited it from her grandfather."
"What grandfather?" she deadpans.
He peers at her, unamused. She flashes him a cocky smile.
"Again," he says. "Do you know why you're here, Katniss Everdeen-Snow?"
"You were desperate to get me to notice you," she says. "Most young men are."
A fierce but indistinguishable emotion flashes in his eyes, but he hides it impressively fast. "You must be hungry," he taunts. "Any requests? More lamb stew or cheese buns to waste? Or . . . perhaps clothes?" He pays her nightgown the sort of explicit attention that replaces one type of hunger for another.
Intimidation? An attempt to fluster? Either way, it's working. It's working its way right through her, and it puts him higher on her hit list.
Two can play this game. Bold as she pleases, she lifts her limbs and rests her bare feet on his knee, crossing them at the ankles. The hem of her gown rides up her calf, exposing a shapely length of olive skin. Peeta tenses. Red sneaks up his neck before he jerks his leg away, causing her feet to fall and smack the floor.
"Eventually, you'll want something," he insists, then regards her with mild disgust. "You're not used to doing without, I'd say."
Her arrogance cannot resist. "Doing without?" she repeats with a scoff. "And how do you think gamemakers are trained?"
He frowns. "Meaning what?"
"Meaning in order to control an arena—"
"Let's get something straight: It's not an arena. It's Hell."
"—we have to know how to survive in one ourselves. Meaning we're tributes long before you are." To her shame, her words trip as she recalls being thrust into a forest without so much as a pat on the head from her grandfather. No sign that he worried about her safety. He'd merely told her not to embarrass him, sipped his Merlot, and fretted over a fly that had landed in the crimson liquid.
A fly. He'd been preoccupied with a fly.
Katniss shakes herself. "Anyhow, don't play the imbecile. I'm sure Plutarch has filled you in about our training. I'm more used to starving than you think. I know what suffering is. I know what it means to be hurt."
Peeta's eyes lose their aggressive luster. "Yet it didn't change what you've become."
She sucks in a breath at his suddenly mournful expression. It resurrects a moment from years ago, untarnished and stupidly sweet in her mind. Is he hoping to gauge how much she remembers of their past, or if she remembers at all?
It's her pleasure to feign ignorance. The memory serves no purpose and is hardly important.
He got her to speak, but she won't let him out of here with the last word. "You're a fool if you think taking me hostage will work. My grandfather isn't going to protect me over preserving his country."
"I know," he answers. "You're not a hostage. You're a prisoner of war with information about Snow that we need."
Despite the shackles, she flattens her hands on her thighs and leans toward him. "And I'm supposed to make myself expendable by giving it to you? Go fuck yourself."
He matches her position, coming nose-to-freckled-nose with her. "At the risk of sounding cliche, we can do this the easy way or the hard way."
She bursts out laughing and lands back in her seat. "You really aren't good at this."
Peeta grimaces, wonderfully defensive and uncertain. "How would you know? Last time I looked, you oversaw arenas—"
"Oooh, I thought they were Hell," Katniss quotes him.
"Your skill is making victims out of innocent kids," Peeta bites out. "Snow's leash on you doesn't extend to interrogating criminals or making judgment calls about them."
With a sigh, Katniss cranes her head back and talks to the ceiling. "The way you've been walking tells me that you have a knife tucked into the back of your right boot and another strapped to your left hip. The former is new to you, but you've been training with the latter for much longer. No guns because you're not good with them—you leave that to the guards who came in here exactly six minutes and forty-two seconds ago. I counted four weapons between them, two belted at their waists and the two hidden under the napes of their necks. Hawthorne's reliable, but he and his partner aren't as whipped into shape as they should be, considering their uniforms are spotless and their nails are pearly white. I'd say those knuckleheads are used mostly for show—at least for now.
"Abernathy and Heavensbee are watching us through the monitor embedded into a hole the size of a pinprick in the ceiling, right above your head. Oh, and you have a syringe stashed under your left sleeve, in case I become difficult. I know the questions you'll ask me, I know how you'll try to tame me, and I know the tools you'll use to do it. My point?" She lowers her head and attempts to stab him with her words. "Don't fucking assume anything about me."
Peeta gives this some good-natured thought, then stands and wipes his hands. "And here I thought you were sharper."
Katniss blinks. Where is he going with this?
"Thank you," he says. "That wasn't as hard as I thought it would be." An ambiguous grin etches into his face. "Now we know exactly who we're dealing with. And what to avoid. Looks like we'll have to get creative with you. But don't worry," he amends when her eyes round in fury. "You've at least earned more water."
The temperature rises ten degrees. Perspiration gathers in her fists. Duped, she realizes. He duped her into bragging and lured her ego into his net. The oldest tactic in existence, and she fell for it. He reduced her to it in less than eight minutes.
Water is brought in. Peeta offers her the plastic cup. She snatches it and pours the contents into her mouth, turning away from him to concentrate on guzzling deeply. Her cheeks start to fill up.
The Mockingjay braces his hands on the back of his now-vacant chair and bends close to her again. "Learn this lesson well, Katniss," he warns. "You don't want to get into a verbal chess battle with me. You will not win—"
She lurches forward and spews a mouthful of water into in his face. It splatters him from forehead to chin.
Peeta's eyes snap shut, his mouth tightening into a line. The shackles bite into her wrists, but she doesn't care. This close she can see prisms slicing through the droplets hanging from his lashes, and hear his tempered breathing clashing with her own.
At last, his eyelids flip open. Those irises are wells, cool and bottomless. More thirsty than ever, Katniss licks her chapped lips.
kpkpkpkpkp
After her wrists turn raw, they only handcuff her whenever Peeta's in her cell. It's not the last time that she tries to stoke his temper. Sometimes when he comes to her, she jumps up, wearing the disgusting gray D13 jumpsuit they've supplied her with, and gives him a mock impersonation of a respectful solider, snapping to attention and barking, "Sir!"
Sometimes she throws her meal tray at him the minute he enters the room, though he's been wise enough not to give her utensils.
Sometimes Katniss makes a show of cracking her knuckles when he enters, like she's been waiting to play all day. To a gross extent, she has. It's diverting to see who will win the next round.
Sometimes she uses a candied voice while giving him vague and unhelpful answers to his questions. Sometimes she ignores his questions, in favor of criticizing his taste in friends instead. Sometimes she goes so far as to talk about Delly Cartwright, which produces a flicker of pain in his eyes—a flicker that Katniss doesn't enjoy, isn't proud of causing, wants to scrub from his face—before he masks it with a withering stare.
None of her antics work. Worse, Peeta selects methods of torture that would be intriguing if they weren't, well, torture. He reads aloud from a book on the history of rocks and chats about the endless varieties of grain that have existed over the ages.
She whistles Rue's tune to bait him again. In response, he just feigns sympathy, saying, "You must be starved for music. I'll have Haymitch play something for you." Minutes after he leaves her cell, an unsavory, melodramatic song from a Capitol musical blasts through the speaker walls. It plays on loop for twenty-four hours.
Another time, he sharpens a pair of scissors in front of her, producing a repetitive, wincing sound. Nothing threatening, but everything maddening, able to cripple any person other than Katniss. It does make her crankier, though.
She keeps a tally of the weeks in her mind. The rebels give her more food than political prisoners would have a prayer of receiving in the Capitol. They allow her to wash in a basin that the guards haul into her cell.
She goes over the map in her head about the hallway layout when she first got here. She tries to make sense of the guard rotation that Peeta has ordered, but she can't, because it appears that he listened to her too well when she boasted about her knowledge of security. She can't even tell anymore where the guards or Peeta have stashed their weapons within their clothes.
She would have thought Peeta Mockingjay Mellark would enjoy holding his evil gamemaker enemy prisoner, having the chance to crack her spirit in half. Yet, most of the time, he fluctuates between grimaces and some other expression, one with a wounded edge to it. Clearly, she must be seeing things.
He has lots of nervous twitches. He scratches the back of his neck when he's perplexed. He pokes his tongue into his cheek when he's trying to figure out whether she's serious. He pauses his speech when she flips her hair over her shoulder. He makes a fist at his side whenever someone is obviously speaking to him through a hidden earpiece—most likely it's Abernathy, the sloppy drunkard.
At night she wonders why Peeta bothers doing all the interrogation work instead of letting one of his partners do it for him. He's the symbol of the rebellion. He must have other pressing matters to deal with. Yet every day, he spends nearly three hours bumping heads with her, giving her far too many opportunities to stare at his mouth.
He has thin, pink lips. Most women would envy the natural color of those lips and go insane wanting to taste them. In the dark and quiet room, Katniss often curses herself, aware that she's now a member of that club. It becomes a routine before she falls asleep, her thinking about his mouth on the verge of a frown, a glower, a smile. She always comes to the same conclusion.
He has the same mouth as when he was a child.
That's the vision that usually causes her to drift into slumber: Little Peeta Mellark chewing on a piece of cheesy bread, grinning at her in between bites. So kind and innocent.
Not innocent anymore, though. Definitely not trustworthy. She has a bad feeling, a very bad feeling, that soon he's going to figure out how to break her.
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