Deep into the winter before the 74th Games, I awake in a client's house (the woman who regulates the sentencing of criminals in Panem, in fact) to the sound of someone crying, begging outside the bedroom. I recognise the voice of my client pleading with someone and slide out of bed, heading towards the half-open door through which artificial light spilled. "Dido?" I say in a hushed voice, but she doesn't hear me.

I peer round the door and see her stood naked in front of her - well, I guess he must be her husband, since nobody else could be acting like that to her. He's shouting, screaming obscenities at her, something about wasting his money on whores. That must be me, then.

"I'm not paying for your fucking obsessions anymore! It's ruining us, woman, and what am I supposed to do when my wife's cheating on me with a victor?"

"Please," Dido wails, "I'll stop, I promise I'll stop, just stop yelling, please stop yelling!"

"NO! I'm sick to the teeth of this!"

"But I only-"

"ENOUGH!" I jerk back from the door as I hear the smack of skin connecting with skin, and a thud that must have been Dido falling to the floor. "How many times do I have to tell you to stop?" the man yells, and I move back to the door to watch him storm out, slamming the front door of the apartment behind him.

Shit, I think, shit. "Dido?"

"Leave me alone," she sobs, still curled up on the floor. I sigh, and walk into the kitchen to fill a towel with ice. "What're you doing?"

"Helping, honey." I sit down next to her and place my fingers under her chin, tilting her head up to face me. There's already a black eye blossoming across the right side of her face, and where the skin has split there's a dribble of blood gluing her eyelashes together. I press the towel of ice to the side of her face and she winces.

"I wish you hadn't seen that," she mumbles, and I cluck my tongue.

"This has happened before," I say, "hasn't it?" I don't have to be clever to notice the old bruises she hides with good make up, and besides, it happens with a lot of my clients. When I get hit, it's usually sexual; this is just anger and cruelty.

"A few times. Before I met you, he was still like it. But he's always sorry afterwards…"

I purse my lips. "Do you love me, Dido Featherwick?"

She stares at me. "More than anything," she says, "I was one of your first sponsors. Why, do you... Do you love me?"

No, not really. But I do pity her, and that counts for something. I want to help. "Of course I do," I console her, pushing a strand of her sky-blue hair behind her ear, "why else would I be your lover?" That earns me a little smile from her. "Do you love him?"

"I..."

"It's okay, honey," I say in an attempt to soothe her, "you can tell me. I'm good at keeping secrets."

"... No," she says at last, "I did once, but not anymore. Not now I have you."

I feel guilty, but it's a long-familiar guilt and easy to push aside. "Dido," I say, "do you want him dead?"

If you asked someone in the districts that, with the possible exception of the Careers, they would be horrified. But this is the Capitol, and murder is a part of their culture both in the assassinations and the Games. "Yes," she said, "well, no, but... I want him gone. And he... He deserves it."

"That's what I thought. Next time I'm round, I'll bring you some pills. They'll work, Dido. Take my word for it."

"What... Where is all this coming from?"

"I don't like bullies," I tell her, "and I am a Victor. And I want the people I love to survive, and I've seen couples like this before. It'll keep getting worse, Dido. You know it will."

She grips my hand tightly. "I can't ask you to do this for me, Denna."

"You don't have to. Just... remember that you owe me a favour, okay?"

I can hear Plutarch's voice in the back of my brain, telling me how Dido is on the verge of Snow's inner circle. But there's also a much louder voice, my own, screaming stop you idiot, stop! Do you want another person's blood on your hands? She's not even worth it!

I ignore both of them, and kiss Dido better for the rest of the night. When the night is at its darkest she's finally asleep, slumbering peacefully at the thought of an escape from her husband, and I bolt back to my own apartment with my fists clenched and shaking. I make for the telephone and call Haymitch on instinct, only then remembering that he broke his own line ages ago. What do I do now? I think, suddenly feeling very alone. Who am I supposed to tell about this? Not Finnick, for fear it might inspire him to do the same thing, Johanna would hardly be a comfort, and Chaff is just useless at things like this. Then I remember another number, and shove my dining table against the wall so I can sit down while I call it.

"Hello?" a voice asks groggily, and I curl up.

"Seeder? It's me."

"Denna?" Seeder says in a low voice, and I remember she has grandkids, tiny ones that she must be trying not to wake up. "What is it?"

"Nothing," I say quickly, "it's not important, I'll let you get back to sleep."

"No you won't," Seeder tells me, "I'm awake now, and I'm not letting you get me out of bed for nothing."

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Just tell me what's upset you."

I don't bother to ask how she knew; Seeder's good at stuff like that. She even knows when something's up with Haymitch, and he's such a constant level of surliness it should be impossible to tell. "I, um… I think I did a bad thing, Seeder. Or at least, I promised I would and now I have to."

"Can you tell me about it?"

The District 11 victors know about the rebellion, although they aren't as involved as some of us- I suppose she thinks I did do something for Plutarch. "Yeah, I…." I gulp. There's no way they would arrest me for assisted murder, even if the line was bugged, and Dido's so important in Snow's government she's got immunity from the laws she helped create.

"Denna?"

Am I crying? I think I might be crying. I wipe my nose on my sleeve and return my attention to my confidante. "Sorry," I say again, "there's this, there's a lady who I, um… she gets beaten up quite badly by her husband. And I didn't think, I just told her I can call in some favors and help her and I, I just wanted to help-"

"Breathe, sweetheart. It's okay, you're okay."

I swallow back down the lump in my throat and continue. "I thought I had stopped killing people, Seeder. Why can't I just fucking think before I open my big dumb mouth?" I end up shouting, and kick a chair in frustration. "Fuck."

Seeder's quiet for a moment before speaking. "And you can't go back on your word?"

"You know I can't."

"Right." She's silent again for a moment, and then I hear a kid yelling in the background. "Nana's busy, Bran! I'll be there in a moment!"

I smile. "Isn't it the middle of the night?"

"Three-year-olds don't understand time. Denna, why did you do it?" She doesn't ask in an accusatory way, which is the only reason why I answer.

"Like I said, I wanted to help," I reply, picking at a loose thread on my stockings. "But good intentions never mean that much anyway, do they?"

"Hmm. And how would you feel if you had just done nothing, and carried on letting this woman be knocked about?"

"Bad, I guess," I say.

"Look – there's no excusing the terrible things people do, sweetheart. But at least you did something, and trust me, you would have felt much worse from inaction than you do now."

"No offense," I say, "but I don't believe that."

"I've learnt it from experience," Seeder says, and I realize she must be talking about her own Games.

I figure it's probably a good idea to steer the conversation away from murder, at this point. "How are Bran and… and…." It definitely begins with T… Turnip, maybe? No, that can't be it.

"Twyla," she says amusedly.

"Twyla! How are they, anyway?"

"Very loud and excitable," Seeder tells me, "they live up here in the Victors' Village, since it's safer for them. I can't stop them from being taken out to work in the fields when they come of age, but at least it helps a little."

Can't stop them from being reaped, either. It would be nice, I think, if the revolution actually started sometime soon, so that Seeder wouldn't live to see her grandkids get reaped. It was a miracle none of her children were, and the Capitol won't miss this time round.

"That sounds… nice?" I guess, and she laughs.

"You're as bad as Haymitch."

"Am not!"

"Well," she says, "almost as bad. Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah. Thanks for picking up, Seeder."

"Anytime. And I'd recommend getting some sleep, too."

I bid her goodbye and hang up, mind inevitably returning back to the matter of Dido. Seeder may well be right, but the matter still remains that I need to procure some poison…

We're at war, I tell myself, doing awful things is kind of the point. I crawl into bed with the intent of sleeping all morning, wrapped up in one of Haymitch's shirt with the guilt crawling over me more than it has done since I was a teenager.

I run myself a bath to clean the smell of Dido off of me before my next client, and take a portable screen with me to arrange a meeting with the man who will sell me the poison. When I've done that I hold my breath and sink beneath the surface of the silky water, counting, seeing how long I can stay down here…

I surface with a gasp and lean forward, arms lolling over the sides of the tub. It's times like these when I wish I had succeeded in dying thirteen years ago. I can see my wavering reflection in the water, barely recognizable as the same girl who volunteered.

"Never thought you'd end up here, huh?" I say, "you weren't even supposed to be pretty." I flick the reflection, making it distort and ripple. "Thanks for the face, mother. Without it, I would probably be another plain old Victor back in One… most likely getting lynched for screwing over the Career system, but still."

She wasn't clever, my mother, or particularly talented; she had never even completed training. But she had a body people lusted after, and that's what saved her. I don't even know what her name was, my memories of her consisting mainly of a safe, warm smell and arms, picking me up before I was old enough to even crawl, when her body hadn't started to rot. The whole of the tiny house had stunk of overripe flesh...

"Stop wallowing in your own self-pity," I tell myself, "this isn't going to help things. You have a..." I bite my lip. "I have a man to help kill."

A/N thank you so very much to Padfootsbane (great name), urmessismine and melliemoo for your reviews! In other news, the most practical use for my Classics A Level so far has been coming up with names for Capitol citizens.