The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)

but she had a sweetness, a vulnerability that invited abuse.

What all of Panem would know one day. What was inevitable.

Snow lands on top.

And he didn’t like love, the way it had made him feel stupid and vulnerable. If he ever married, he’d choose someone incapable of swaying his heart. Someone he hated, even, so they could never manipulate him the way Lucy Gray had. Never make him feel jealous. Or weak.

Lucy Gray’s fate was a mystery, then, just like the little girl who shared her name in that maddening song. Was she alive, dead, a ghost who haunted the wilderness? Perhaps no one would ever really know. No matter — snow had been the ruination of them both. Poor Lucy Gray. Poor ghost girl singing away with her birds.

And if even the most innocent among us turn to killers in the Hunger Games, what does that say? That our essential nature is violent,” Snow explained.

The Plinths paid for everything now: the taxes on the apartment, his tuition, the cook. They gave him a generous allowance as well.

Snow suggested that the victor should be given a house in a special area of town, tentatively called the Victor’s Village, which would be the envy of all those people in the hovels.

he’d wondered where Lucy Gray was. Dead in the rain? Curled up by the fire in the lake house? If she’d survived, surely she’d abandoned the idea of returning to District 12. He dozed off with the melody to “The Hanging Tree” humming in his brain

The lake water had reduced his mother’s rose-scented powder to a nasty paste, and he threw the whole thing in the trash. The photos stuck together and shredded when he tried to separate them, so they went the way of the powder.

“Lucy Gray!” he bellowed in frustration. Clever, devious, deadly girl. She knew they’d cover for her. He lifted the rifle and machine-gunned the trees, trying to wipe out the birds.