Snow's face beams its smile down at her like some terrible lighthouse, and then he is gone. Katniss stares up to where she is sure there must be an open door. This is a trap.

For a moment she is frozen on the stairs, listening, bow drawn, terrified. Anything could be waiting for her at the top of those stairs. An army of Peacekeepers, or just Snow with an assault rifle. This could be her death.

Should she leave? Scope out the building? Wait in the woods for him to emerge and then bring sharp death to his throat? Yes, that is what she should do.

It is not what she does.

Instead, Katniss climbs the stairs, rounding the top, making no more noise than a cat. On the landing a door stands ajar, and beyond is an empty hallway. Her feet are shadows. She lacks any ability to take in the details of the hallway other than that it is empty, but another door stands open, and through here is the source of the light. She can hear movement. She steps through.

The room is a spacious kitchen diner, lit by a single gas lamp, but she has no time or interest to pay attention to it. Snow is in the kitchen. He is doing something with a teapot. Why is there a teapot? She can make no sense of this. All she knows is that he is here. Snow is here.

He regards her with a smile. 'Tea?'

She raises the bow. 'Get your hands in the air.'

He smiles with geniality and arrogance. 'Would you prefer coffee?'

'I said get your fucking hands in the air!' Her voice is louder and harsher than she anticipated. She despises the break in it, the weakness. Her hand is sweating against her bow. She feels irrational, maddened. Feral with hatred. He is alive, and he is here.

Snow raises his hands slowly. 'My, you are on edge. I assure you that you are safe, and that we are alone. I am armed, however.'

Her heart palpitates. 'Where? What weapons?'

Snow smiles, everything about him cool and placid. 'I have a gun in my hip holster and a knife strapped against my right leg.'

Katniss is shaking. Her hair has come loose and hangs in sticky spirals in front of her vision. She vaguely wants to throw up.

'Get on your knees,' she says, voice hoarse. 'Hands behind your head.'

He looks at her in question. 'Is this really necessary, Miss Everdeen? Wouldn't you prefer to rest?'

'Do it!'

He breathes out, as though annoyed with her, and then places his hands behind his head. It is with difficulty that he lowers himself to the floor. He is an old man, and this cannot be comfortable for him.

Good.

Then she crosses the room, boots sharp against the floorboards, and she switches out her bow for the gun. She loads it and cocks it, then holds the metal against his skin and she watches his reaction. She knows many people will flinch with the animal noise of a gun loading in their face. Snow looks completely calm. His eyes, light and horrible blue, watch her back. She presses the barrel against his cheek and studies the give of his older, soft skin against the pressure of metal on flesh.

'If you try anything, I will shoot you.'

'Understood, Miss Everdeen.'

She extracts the gun from his holster first, then tosses that across the room. She then pats down his chest, searching for anything that could be used as a weapon. It makes her skin ripple and her hatred quake to touch him like this. She has never touched him before, and certainly never felt the full, solid reality of his torso beneath her palms, over and over again. She wants to find something lethal. Wants to catch him in a lie. Wants something that will justify killing him.

But she finds only a pen in his breast pocket. She throws this aside, then unstraps the knife that's against his leg. The brief heat of his skin through cotton fabric against her hands terrifies her.

'Do you see that I was truthful with you? I always am.'

She wants to spit on him. She wants to hurt him. Tear, cut, bite, kill.

She backs off, aiming the gun with one hand, then slips off her pack and rummages in it with the other. Removes the zip-ties.

Snow glances at them. He seems amused. 'Ah. I see you're very much opposed to my making you tea.'

'Stand up and turn around.'

It is difficult for him to rise. He stands slowly, awkwardly, making low noises of discomfort in his throat as he straightens. She does not think he is faking. The last time she saw him, he appeared a dying man.

'Hands behind your back.' She gestures with her gun at a copper pipe that runs floor to ceiling. 'Against that wall.'

He obeys, crossing the room, and Katniss replaces her gun and takes out her knife. She's better with it, and in close quarters the gun will be unnecessary. She approaches warily. Snow helpfully crosses wrist over wrist behind his back. She does not want to touch him more.

He touched her, once. A crown on her head. Pulling back her hair. What a lovely pin, he had said. Gloves had shielded her material body from his.

It is with horror that she reaches out and touches his hands with hers. They are old, brown-flecked, thick-veined, rough-skinned. She feels like she is holding two massive, venomous insects. She binds them quickly around the pipe, fixing him in place, and the moment he is restrained she backs off and pulls out her gun once again. Her breathing is rapid, her heart is on fire.

Snow regards her temperately. 'I assure you, Miss Everdeen, this is not necessary.'

Satisfied that Snow is restrained, her panic cooling, she finally allows herself to take in her surroundings. It might have once been a fine apartment: huge windows, high ceilings, cornicing, a massive fireplace. Snow has kept it in good condition; there is not a spot of dust to be seen. But the cracks in the ceiling are huge and buckets are placed to catch leaks. Some of the walls are crumbling. As she draws her gun again and paces through to the next room, a lounge, she sees one broken window has been boarded up.

There is a desk here and a huddle of electronics: one screen, a keyboard, devices whose purpose she couldn't guess. They are attached to an old, dangerous-looking generator, as well as some kind of bicycle rotor. Self-generating electricity, and very little of it.

Books are the main occupant. They fill the shelves but are also piled high on the floors. Ancient, crumbling books. Ancestral texts. Things he must have scavenged.

Gun still drawn, she finds her way into the bedroom. She checks under the bed and the wardrobe, but there is no secret strike force awaiting her. The bed is neatly made. A set of wrinkled pajamas is folded on the coverlet. This sends a tremor of disgust down her spine. On the bedside table is a book, atop which lies a pair of reading glasses. The Temptation of St Anthony. An ugly smirk crawls up her face and she gingerly opens the cover, but she is disappointed to discover that it does not appear to be pornographic. A shame. It would have been reassuring to see some human baseness in him.

She gives the bathroom a cursory glance, but there is nowhere for anyone to hide. Her gaze lingers on the sink. A ceramic cup holds a battered toothbrush and a very old tube of toothpaste. She looks at the toilet and the shower-bath, and her eyes note a couple of hairs lying against the ceramic. She shudders at this, too. One is darker and curled. This is surreal.

Katniss rejoins Snow in the dining kitchen, dimly lit by the single gas lamp. She has the time and energy now to take in the piles of canned goods that are heaped up along the walls, some with faded labels and rust. Snow remains tied to the pipe. He was already smiling, she is sure, before she came in.

'Are you satisfied that we are alone?'

She does not answer. She is exhausted. She just stands and breathes deeply.

There he is: the gross reality of him, death from her dreams, standing tied to a copper pipe with a smile she knows better than the smile of her mother. Or sister. At first, she thinks he looks the same, and that a day could have passed since last they spoke. But the more she stares, the more she can sense the deviations from her memory. His beard is rougher, no longer the work of professional stylists. His hair is looser, casually swept back rather than artfully held in place. His clothes are the most obvious difference: still smart, but only a white shirt, blazer, and dark slacks rather than the gorgeous suits and robes she knew him by. Is this still the President of Panem she once knew? Or is this an odd old man with a smile she remembers from a half-forgotten dream?

She has the curious sense that he is foregoing speaking to give her a moment to grapple with this absurdity. Or, perhaps, he too wants to take a moment to assess her. Does she look the same? That girl with a golden pin and a golden crown, or that young woman with a bow drawn in hatred? She cannot say.

Eventually, he speaks. 'You look tired, Miss Everdeen. Won't you sit?' He nods graciously to the dining table and chairs, which Katniss spares a glance. She is tired. She will not sit. 'If you won't allow me to serve you tea, then please help yourself,' Snow continues. 'I began preparing the pot as soon as I saw you from the window. It is steeping now; it will be ready to drink in a few minutes.' He pauses, smile like burnished silver. 'It's Ceylon.'

This time, her gaze lingers on the kitchenette. There is a large, blue and white porcelain teapot on the countertop. Steam stretches leisurely from its spout.

Katniss walks to the counter, lifts the teapot, then empties its contents down the drain.

Snow's expression is an ambiguous mix of amusement and annoyance. 'Again, Miss Everdeen, if you'd prefer coffee, you have only to ask.'

'I'm not about to let you poison me,' she says, and sets the teapot down with a rude thunk. She considers smashing it, but the blue landscape is painted onto the white so beautifully that it seems wrong.

Snow laughs. It is quiet and warm, and there is a taste of nostalgia in it. 'I would never poison you, Miss Everdeen. You are far too interesting.'

She looks at him, and he looks at her. Those familiar eyes, like a pale blue sky. The deep lines of his face. The smile that so often lingers at his mouth or the crease of his eyes, but which she has seen vanish in his moments of disdain and anger. He has looked at her before with hate. Now, he is just as he was the last time they spoke in his greenhouse. Strange, smiling, amused. Pleased to see her. Pleased to be entertained.

'If you are concerned about poison,' Snow continues, 'there is plenty of sealed canned food in those boxes.' He nods at the familiar Capitol crates, though these do not bear the imprint of Coin. 'You can know that those are safe. I lack the resources to reseal canned goods.' He smiles widely, and Katniss does not return it.

She despises following his suggestion, but she has been on the road all day and eaten only greens and squirrel. She will have to eat sometime, and her own supplies are much easier to transport than Snow's pile of canned goods. She cracks open one of the crates, which is filled with sawdust, and from this she pulls out a can of something called cheese macaroni. The picture on the can is faded. She rotates it and reads the information on the end. It's only a year out of date. She's eaten worse.

The can isn't swollen and it smells fine once it's open, so Katniss lets herself into Snow's cutlery drawer and pulls out a fork. She leaves the drawer open. It is satisfying to disturb his neatly ordered existence. She finally sits at the dining room table and begins to eat, never taking her eyes off him, as he never takes his off her. They share silence for a long time, until the can is empty. Katniss drinks some mouthfuls from her canteen, then takes a long breath. She has so many questions, and she hates him so much.

'I thought you were dead,' she says at last. There is betrayal in her voice. It is as though he lied to her. Didn't they promise not to do that?

'It was not my intention to leave you with that impression,' says Snow. It is almost apologetic. 'After I escaped, I had to go into hiding. I could hardly announce my survival on the news.'

'Coin faked your death,' says Katniss. 'You collaborated with her?' It's an accusation. Coin killed Prim. Snow was Coin's enemy. How dare he convince her to shoot Coin and then go behind Katniss' back to work with the woman who killed her sister? It is the most disgusting betrayal.

'I did not collaborate with Coin,' Snow says, firmly but gently. 'She organized that staged execution of her own volition. She wanted the world to believe me dead. After my escape, I gather she wanted to project a sense of stability. An ex-president running free around the country can't have helped that image.'

This, bizarrely, calms Katniss a bit. Snow is still against Coin. Katniss is against Coin. That doesn't make them allies, but it removes one point of violent hatred from their relationship.

'How did you escape?'

He quirks his eyebrows in a particular way that suggests a mix of humility and irritation. 'It is an underwhelming story. After your arrow injured Coin, they took me to the nearest place suitable to hold me, a bank, and kept me in the vault. Some of the people who worked there were not what you'd call District 13's elite.' He shrugs. 'It was trivial to bribe one of the less sophisticated guards with the codes to some of my money caches in the Capitol. I acquisitioned a hovercraft, and here I am.'

'That's it?' she says accusatorily.

'I apologize if you were expecting a thrilling tale of daring theatrics,' he says with another smile. 'The greatest failures in systems and security are always the result of human error. One single person, making the wrong choice.'

She feels, somehow, that this is supposed to refer to her. She has made plenty of wrong choices.

'What are you doing here?' she says, but Snow shakes his head like a disappointed parent.

'No, no, Miss Everdeen. You have asked me a question and I have answered it, in full detail. Now I will ask you a question.'

'Or,' says Katniss, 'you answer everything I ask, because you're tied to a pipe and if you refuse I'll kill you.'

A broad smile spreads over Snow's face. 'Miss Everdeen.' He shakes his head and tuts. 'If you were going to kill me, you would have already done it. Now, my question.' He looks her over, considering how to use this privilege he has bestowed upon himself. Suddenly, he says: 'Mr Mellark. How is he?'

She is caught off guard. She was expecting a question about the rebellion, some attempt to wheedle information out of her. Perhaps that is exactly what this is. Perhaps Snow assumes Peeta is part of it.

'He's fine,' she says flatly. 'Now, what are you doing here?'

Snow shakes his head once again. 'Play the game properly, Miss Everdeen. Do you not want to discuss Mr Mellark? Strange, because you were so keen on him the last times we spoke. I consider it one of the great tragedies of my exile that I was unable to attend your wedding.' She does not respond, and he tilts his head. 'Or is the wedding off? Did you decide that you were indifferent to him after all, and pursue the Hawthorne boy? Or,' and here he smiles in a way she very much dislikes, 'are you still with him? Still indifferent? Cooking his meals and dreaming of a better life?'

'Peeta cooks,' she snaps.

Snow smiles like an alligator digesting a big meal, and Katniss realizes she has risen to his bait.

Tied to a pipe, and he's still got an edge on me.

'I am sorry to hear that Mr Mellark hasn't proved the fulfilling mate you desired.' The word mate jars on her ears, and she knows what he's trying to imply. Not just a romance, but a reproductive one. Snow, somehow, senses her dislike of motherhood instinctively. 'But fair is fair,' Snow continues. 'You may now ask me a question.'

She has fallen into his game. He is too good at this, too compelling. The rhythms of his conversation are so easy to slip into.

Well, fine. He's still tied to a pipe.

'The last time I saw you, you were coughing up blood,' she says. 'I thought you were dying.'

'I was,' he answers. 'I was entirely resigned to my death, be it at your hand, Coin's, or the failings of my own body.' His eyes leave her face. 'And yet here I am.' They snap back onto her. 'I have been taking care of myself. You would be amazed how one's health improves when one stops ingesting poison,' he says, dry and droll. Then his eyes flick over her body, not with prurience but with a scientific curiosity. 'And you, Miss Everdeen? Have you been taking care of yourself?'

'I'm in good health, if that's what you mean,' she bites back. 'Now tell me what you're doing here.'

Snow looks around the sad apartment. 'Enjoying my retirement, such as it is.'

She shakes her head. 'Not good enough. Answer properly. What are you doing here? You landed three days' walk from my front door. That's not a coincidence.' A strange feeling comes into her chest and her tone: an inexplicable feeling of resentment. 'But you didn't come to find me. Why not?'

'I tried,' says Snow, and there is an odd, portentous sincerity to it. 'I tried to reach you. I walked for most of a day and barely covered ten miles. Then I twisted my ankle.' He smiles to himself. 'The frailty of the flesh. Something of which I so rarely needed to be reminded as President. But at my age, the inconveniences of youth are death sentences. I barely made it back here alive.' His eyebrows rise and fall. 'Well, I could hardly contact you through any electronic means. Coin monitors everything that comes in and out of District 12.' He looks around him at his crumbling apartment. 'I chose this place, bearing the name of Primrose, in case I couldn't reach you. On the hopes that you might reach me. And now you have.' He looks her over strangely and Katniss tightens the grip on her gun. 'My turn.' He pauses for a long time, considering his question. Katniss feels she is being carefully assessed. 'Are you happy, Miss Everdeen?'

This question catches her off guard. 'What kind of a question is that?'

'A straightforward one. Why leave your home, your lover, your life to seek out an old man who you hate?'

The answer is an image. Peeta smiling up at her from the garden, a trowel in hand, planting vegetables. A child playing in the dirt. Her own pregnant belly. She shudders. That is not her. That could never be her.

'I wanted to kill you,' she says simply. And that's true. Haymitch might have recruited her to aid the rebellion, but that wasn't the fire that drove her. It was the idea of Snow, alive, but dying in her arms. Her fingers around his neck, or a blade inside him. Feeling him die against her. Yes, that was what she wanted.

Snow seems to enjoy this answer. 'Wanted in the past tense, Miss Everdeen? You can kill me now, you know. I can't stop you.' He glances down at himself: unarmed, restrained, vulnerable. 'You could shoot me, or cut me to pieces, or land an arrow in me. Land several, if you like.' He smiles. 'I also have some rat poison. That might be a poetic mode of execution, if you'd prefer.' The smile grows smaller, yet somehow keener. 'Why haven't you killed me yet, Miss Everdeen?'

'That's three questions,' she snaps. 'Answer me one. Why did you come here? Why did you want to find me?'

He is silent for a long time. His eyes do not leave her face and Katniss wants to look away, but she forces herself to hold his gaze. Eventually, he speaks.

'Allow me to make some inferences, Miss Everdeen. It took you over two years to come and find me. This is because you believed I was dead. If you have been told otherwise, that is because someone has access to new information that Coin has kept secret. I am aware that there is a rebellion, opposed to Coin, and that it isn't going well. You are here because the rebellion has recruited you to recruit me to take down Coin.' He smiles. 'In my view, the rag-tag rebellion could use new leadership.'

Katniss laughs. A harsh, single note at first, and then a cascade of giggles. 'Oh,' she manages through her laughter, 'and do you think the rebellion should make you their new leader?'

Snow's smile is a little bit mocking, but most of it seems buoyed by the force of her laughter. 'Of course not, Miss Everdeen. I think you should be the leader.'

Her laughter dies in her throat. 'I'm not a leader,' she says quietly. 'I hated being the mockingjay.'

'You were badly advised,' says Snow, and his tone is curiously soft. 'You could have been a fantastic leader, not just of the rebellion, but all of Panem.'

Katniss smiles thinly. 'Let me guess. With you at my side, puppeteering me? Ruling from the shadows? And then, when the time is right, you have me killed and take over once again?'

To her surprise, Snow laughs. She has heard him laugh before: quiet chuckles, noises of contentment. This is a strange, hearty laugh: wholesome and full.

'Miss Everdeen,' he says through a wide smile, 'I am retired. I am quite finished with the office of presidency. I had my time, and I was deposed. Such is the way of all rulers, if they live long enough. I am satisfied that I held this nation together for the decades I ruled, and I saved it from slipping into total chaos.'

Katniss shakes her head in absolute disgust. 'Do you think you were a good President?'

'Oh yes,' he says. His eyes flash. 'I would like to see you do better.' It doesn't quite sound like an insult.

The room is dark now the sun has set, lit only by the gas lamp on the kitchen countertop. Shadows quiver on the walls. Snow's face is lit dimly from below, the lines of his face stark, ghoulish and deathly. The apartment looks even worse without the sunlight. The shadows are long, every pockmark in every wall thrown into relief. Katniss can see a dead cockroach on the floor.

'I can't believe you live like this,' she mutters.

'I make do,' says Snow. 'I think of it as my hermitage. I rarely leave. The computers are my only window into the civilized world.'

Katniss does not know what a hermitage is. His computers intrigue her, so she wanders over and flicks a switch. They whir into life, and Katniss starts at what she sees on the old monitor. There are various windows open. One is a news broadcast, the usual one she watches at home. One is a document in a language she cannot read: 'puella adest, et tempus puto…' And then there is a camera feed. She recognizes it immediately. The main street of the Victors' Village. Her own house is just visible. She can see the thin crop of crocuses in the earth that Peeta just planted. It is a live feed.

She turns her head slowly to Snow. He looks extremely amused.

'You were watching me?' she says.

'Naturally. I had many cameras installed in District 12 when I was President, and though most have failed over the years without anyone to maintain them, there is still one I can access. It sits in a telegraph pole in the Victors' Village. I see you leave your house to hunt almost every morning. I see you return, too, when I can spare the electricity. You look the same as you always have. Only a little older.'

This information provokes a bizarre twist of emotions: fear and disgust, violation, but also a reassuring familiarity. Snow has been watching her since the war ended. Indeed, save for her sojourn in District 13, Snow has been watching her non-stop since she volunteered as tribute. His eyes never left her. She was never alone.

'Well,' she says, stepping back from the computer. 'Since you so love to invade my personal space, let's even it out.'

With petty violence, she yanks out the drawer of the desk. Papers. She flicks through, but it's all numbers and codes that she doesn't understand. She keeps digging. This drawer and then that, and then she finds one with a lock that doesn't open.

'Key?' she says, looking expectantly at Snow.

He smiles, refusing to comply.

'I can just shoot out the lock and damage whatever is in there.'

Snow's self-satisfied smile slips the tiniest bit. 'Fair play. The key is underneath the pile of canned kidney beans in the corner.'

She stalks over, upturns the beans, finds the key, then returns to the drawer. The lock opens with some difficulty. The drawer is almost entirely empty, save for a slim stack of shiny paper, which she removes. Photographs. The first depicts a little girl, dressed in shimmery silver, adorned with plastic fairy wings. Some costume for some Capitol party. Her gaze lingers on the child's big, happy eyes. As in the face of every little girl, she sees the ghost of Prim. A daughter? More likely a granddaughter.

She flicks through to the next photograph. This one is older, crinkled, faded. It depicts a young woman, perhaps her own age, give or take a few years. Thin, pointed features. Long, styled blonde hair. A strange smile, as though frightened, appeasing. Pretty, but haunted. Her eyes are not on the camera but on something or someone behind it. There is something oddly familiar about her.

Katniss turns and holds up the photo. 'Your wife? Daughter?'

Snow shakes his head slowly. 'I only had a son.'

Katniss assesses the age of the photo. 'Ex-girlfriend?'

The humor has evaporated from Snow's features. 'Family,' he says quietly.

She turns to the final photo and recoils. It's her. Her in the Quarter Quell, her hair loose, her bow raised, her arrow pointing up into the sky. She looks triumphant and terrified.

'You have a picture of me?'

'Yes,' says Snow. His features are still guarded.

She regards him with spite and disgust. 'What the fuck is this?'

'It's to remember,' he says delicately. His words come slowly, chosen with specificity. 'When I selected this place, I knew I might never leave. That I might die here. From starvation or the elements or animals or other human beings, perhaps. I could accept that.' He tilts his head. 'But I did not wish for dementia to take me. I would have ended my life, if it came to that. But if my computers and my memories failed, I wanted to still have some way to remember.'

'Why would you want to remember me?' she says, words illuminated by anger.

He smiles his strange smile. 'Because you were an important person in my life, Miss Everdeen.'

She rolls her eyes, then rips her photo cleanly in two. The faintest ripple of discomfort goes through Snow. She rips again, reducing it to quarters, then eighths, then she walks to the window, cracks it open, and tosses the pieces out. They flutter into the wind. She is sick of Snow looking at her.

Her violent fingers then linger on the other two photos. The little girl and the woman. She drums her fingertips against them.

'Miss Everdeen,' says Snow, and she can hear the tension in his voice. 'I would ask you not to destroy those. I was unable to make copies. They are the only images I have.'

'Who are they?'

He shifts his jaw. 'They are my family.'

'You can do better than that.' She holds up the picture of the little girl. Where are the photos of Prim? There are none. They were too poor for a camera before the Games, and too occupied by terror after to bother. If she could get a copy of the old footage, there would be an image of Prim at the reaping, broadcast to all of Panem. That is the only trace of Prim that remains. Terrified, tiny, shaking. That is how the world will remember her. How cruel that Snow can remember his family dressed in smiles and glitter. 'Who is she?' Katniss lets her fingers rip the tiniest bite into the edge of the photo.

'She is my granddaughter,' says Snow immediately. 'Please, Miss Everdeen.'

Something in his quiet, polite dignity dims Katniss' spite. She sets down the photograph and holds aloft the young woman. 'And this?'

Snow looks at the photograph and then at Katniss. He gives a single, tiny shake of his head. Katniss positions her fingers again and lets a little rip open the edge of the photo, but Snow says nothing more. She studies him, seeking any sign of pain in his features, as she rips the photo in two. He is perfectly blank. She rips the photo again and again, and then drops that out of the window, too. A tiny shred of a woman's face blows away in the wind.

'Guess she can't have been that important to you,' Katniss says, shrugging.

There is no reaction from Snow. Katniss wishes she knew what cruelty she just inflicted. There are so many terrible things she wants to do to him. Her enemy. Ruler, master, emperor of her trauma. Now just an old man tied to a pipe. How pathetic it is to bring someone so titanic to such a low state. What satisfaction. What beauty.

The silence goes on for some time. Snow's eyes remain on her, always on her face, gazing inside her. She gazes back.

She recalls one of their final exchanges in the greenhouse. I've been watching you. And you were watching me.

She hasn't been watching him, not for three years. He has been neatly, surgically cut out of her life. But he has watched her. How could she possibly conceive of a world in which one of them is not watching the other?

She cannot take her gaze away.

'I'm here to take you to the District 12 rebel base,' she says at last. 'They want you. Your knowledge. To take down Coin.'

Snow nods. 'As I anticipated. How will we get there?'

This topic calms her. Practicalities. Logistics. So much easier than thoughts of killing Snow, or not killing Snow. 'We go on foot. It's a long way. Hundreds of miles. That's all you need to know.'

For the very first time, Snow looks caught off guard. This brings Katniss a raw, sick delight. 'That is indeed a long way.'

'Too much for you?' she says nastily.

He tilts his head, considering. 'Perhaps. Please understand that I am not complaining about the length of the trip, Miss Everdeen. But I am an old man. There are limits to my physical capabilities. Such a trip could kill me.'

'Sounds like I win either way.'

He examines her. He is always examining her: watching, assessing, staring, gazing. His eyes bore gently into her, like a knife into soft dirt. 'Do you really want me dead, Miss Everdeen?'

'Of course I do,' she says immediately. 'I should never have listened to you in that greenhouse. I should have shot you, not Coin. At least then one of the worst people in my life would be dead.'

Snow contemplates her. 'Of course.' He inhales and his eyes momentarily flick elsewhere. 'But know this, Miss Everdeen. It brings me genuine happiness to see you again.' His eyes meet hers again and they are alive and on fire. The brightness dazzles her.

This statement somehow exhausts her more than three days of hiking. She tries not to betray any reaction to it, busying herself instead with her pack. She extracts her bedroll and she shakes this out onto the carpet, then unrolls her sleeping bag. It will, at least, be more comfortable than the hard ground she has tolerated the past few nights. But a short reprieve. She'll be back in the wilderness in a few hours.

'We'll leave at first light,' she says.

'Miss Everdeen, you are welcome to sleep on the couch in the next room,' says Snow. 'Or take the bed, if you prefer. There are clean sheets in the closet.'

'I'm not letting you out of my sight,' she says.

For the second time that evening, she gets some genuine surprise out of Snow. 'Aren't you going to untie me?'

She grabs the gas lamp and sets it next to the sleeping bag, and then she sits down upon her makeshift bed. 'Nope.'

'I see.' He smiles at something that privately amuses him, and then awkwardly slides down the pipe, working himself into a sitting position.

She pulls off her boots and shrugs off her leather jacket and then, from habit, is about to pull loose her braid. She thinks better off it. Snow is still staring at her, and there is something unsettling to her about him seeing her undo her braid. There is an intimacy to it that upsets her stomach. Leaving the braid in place, Katniss slides into the sleeping bag.

Perhaps Snow senses her trepidation. 'I assure you, Miss Everdeen, you are perfectly safe. I am unarmed and restrained, and at a distinct physical disadvantage. I also have no wish to kill you.' His smile is warped and inhuman, lit from underneath by the gas lamp. 'I have never lied to you, Miss Everdeen. You know that.'

There are so many things she feels to look at him. Hatred and fear, and a lust for violence. And something else. A sense that a kind of order has been restored to her life. An insane notion that Snow watching her is the way that things ought to be.

She turns down the gas lamp. 'Goodnight, Snow.'

Her own tone is sarcastic, but Snow's voice is filled with something weirdly warm and soft. She cannot place it. 'Goodnight, Miss Everdeen.'