A/N: Okay so first off I want to apologise about how freaking long it has been in between updates (especially because I left you with that evil cliff-hanger) but like I said last time I have been crazy busy at the moment and this was a chapter that I needed a lot of time for. Hopefully it won't ever take me this long to update again and to all of you who favourited/alerted at the end of the last chapter I promise I'm not normally this slow.

You may also be wondering why I'm doing my A/N at the start of the chapter (don't worry there's another one at the end ) but I wanted to get the chance to apologise now before you read this. Anyways here you all go and I will see you again at the end of the chapter.

Murderers and Mourners

I'd nearly drowned once. It was a long time ago, back before my sisters had been born or my mother and Hal had died, I think I was around nine years old at the time. It was when Hal had been trying to teach me how to swim in the lake out in the forest. It was one of the first times that he had let me swim without his help, and I had loved every single second of it. I had revelled in the feeling of the water around me, loving how free I had felt, finally able to hold my own in the cool water. But I had been overly ambitious and one day I had decided to run up to the edge of the water and dive headfirst into the lake. The thing was, I hadn't been able to see the bottom of the water from where I had dived in, which I had assumed meant that it was very deep there. I was wrong. What was actually at the bottom was a rock platform, and the minute I had broken through the water my head had collided with a huge, strong stone. And like that, I became petrified.

It had been terrifying, that feeling of all the air escaping my lungs as they filled with water. Of watching as I sunk deeper and deeper into the depths of the lake and not being able to do a thing about it. Feeling the oxygen being cut from my system and mentally screaming over and over for my body to do something, to react in some way, to fight for my life. I had been sure I was going to die that day, and I would have, if Hal hadn't been there to dive in and save me. For months I had refused to ever go back in the water, but after months and months of gentle coaxing, Hal had been able to get me to swim again, and over time I was able to forget it had ever happened. It became possible to touch the water without feeling like I was drowning all over again, and I would repeatedly thank any higher power that Hal had been there with me.

This time, there was no one here to save me. There was nothing but the brute force of Angora's hands around my neck, slowly crushing my windpipe, and as my body's supply of oxygen began to rapidly decrease a thick feeling of light-headedness began to overcome me. The huge, tensed muscles in Angora's forearms were pulsing as she applied more and more pressure to the exposed part of neck. I tried with everything I had to breathe, but there was just no opening for any air to escape down into my throat.

So I did the only thing I could do, the first reaction that came to my suspended body. I thrashed and struggled and kicked with all the energy I had left, bashing my fists against her trunk like arms and jerking my legs out to kick her in the stomach and the chest but she was like a freaking rock. She literally didn't budge. No matter how desperately I kicked or punched or scratched or struggled she didn't move an inch. The panic in me started to grow as I faced the very real possibility of dying right here and now and my desperate attempt at fighting increased to the point where I began reaching out to scratch out Angora's eyeballs. Unfortunately my arms were just that little bit too short so instead I ended up driving my nails into her wrists, hoping that the pain would cause her to let go. But nope, despite the fact that my nails had literally broken her skin and drawn blood she didn't so much as flinch.

My wide, panic-stricken eyes locked with hers as she watched the life slowly draining from my body. If it hadn't been me she was in the process of killing I could have been almost awed by how calm she was whilst she was killing someone. Her eyes held that same uninterested, unemotional look that they always did, not even the smallest flicker of doubt on her face as she held me suspended in the air, my apparently miniscule body caught in her iron grasp. I could see why Sylas had kept her around for so long: he was the brains, she was the brawn, that much was always obvious, but she was the brawn that had absolutely no issue with murdering anyone. No issue with murdering me.

I continued to try and pry her fingers away from my throat, but as my efforts continued to prove futile and I could feel my strength being sapped out of me, my hope of surviving began dying along with me. My heart was pounding against my chest and I could hear my heartbeat drumming in my ears as my vision began to go blurry. After a few more moments I didn't have the energy to continue clawing at her huge, ape-like hands, and my arms slowly dropped down to my sides.

Despite being here, in the Hunger Games, I hadn't really contemplated what it would be like to actually die. I mean of course I'd thought about it, when you are literally on death's door you can't really ignore it, but I hadn't so far been in this position where everything I did was futile. Even when we had all been bitten by those god damn vipers I had still felt like I had some hope of coming out of everything alive. But this...this was the most terrifying feeling I had ever experienced in my entire life. I was literally watching myself die. And despite everything that had happened, I still didn't want to die.

Instinctually my hand went to my silver and sapphire bracelet that Macie had given me, the one with Alara's white ribbon lacquered down to it. Would they be watching now, Alara and Macie? Would they be screaming at the TV, begging me to do something, to fight for myself? Of course they would, but what could I do?

As my hand fell back down to my side my fingers brushed against something cold and hard at my waist. In that moment I remembered that I had one last chance of living through this. With absolutely everything I had left I grabbed onto one of the knives at my waist and slashed it across her left cheek, leaving a line of dark red blood on her pale flesh. She winced in pain and as her hands flinched and instinctually went to her cheek to stop the bleeding I fell from her grasp, landing in a heap at the trunk of the tree I had been pinned against. Without thinking I took the knife and with all my strength I slammed in into the top of her foot, causing her to growl in pain. I quickly got out of her arms-reach milliseconds before her mace smashed into the snow-covered ground where I had been lying.

A few feet away from her I began heaving and gasping for breath, each intake of oxygen feeling as painful as swallowing acid. My crushed windpipe made each raspy breath feel like knives were being scratched down my throat, but I kept heaving, the oxygen refuelling my body. As I continued wheezing I looked back to see Angora turn and pull the knife out of her foot and she called over to someone from behind the line of snow-capped trees. Tripp emerged from behind the trees, Dahlia's crappy old spear clutched tightly in his grasp and when he saw me sprawled practically defenceless in the snow he gave me a huge, animalistic smile. Brilliant. Bloody freaking brilliant. Barely able to breathe and now I had to take on two of people who wanted me dead the most. Life rocks.

I quickly scrambled up onto my feet and began running as fast as was humanly possible back in the direction of my camp, hoping beyond hope that I'd be able to reach it before I got either a mace or a spear to the head. Even though I was hanging on to life by a string I managed to keep well in front of Tripp and Angora. Running is what I do, it's the only thing I'm the best at, and oxygen or no oxygen I could outrun those giants any day. But it came at a cost. With every step my muscles felt like they were on fire, every breath felt like it was burning my lungs and my body soon began to feel like it was turning into lead. It got to the point where I couldn't afford to keep flinging away the braches that were in my path so I just tried to ignore each scrape against my skin and make it back to where the tent was set up. I could hear the sound of someone thrashing through the forest behind me, which only spurred me on faster.

God was it really this far back to the camp? I did not remember it feeling like it took me this long last time: mind you last time I hadn't just been strangled for a good minute by a freaking brute and I wasn't running for my life. I had myself almost thinking that I was going in the wrong direction when I heard the sound of voices coming from somewhere in front of me.

"What the hell did you do? How could you just let her run away from you?"

I think I nearly had a heart attack at hearing Caden's voice, but it immediately drove me to move even faster.

"Look I don't want to talk about it right now okay. Let's just find her. She can't be far."

Jett's voice sounded so close, so teasingly close, yet I couldn't see either of them. I knew I must be approaching the camp but I didn't know how much longer I could continue at this pace before I wore myself down completely. The two of them started calling out my name, and as much as I wanted to shout back to them I couldn't make any sound come out of my mouth. But then I saw them.

I burst out of the clearing at a speed of knots and as soon as they saw me a look of relief passed over both of Caden and Jett's faces. That was until I fell in a crumpled heap on the floor in front of them.

"Eora!" Caden exclaimed before kneeling down in the snow to scoop me up and help bring me back to my feet. His eyes held a concerned and panicked look as he gazed at my face which I was guessing didn't look exactly healthy at the moment. Jett approached us slowly and his eyes bulged as they took in the sight of my neck, which I imagine looked either very bruised or very red.

"Rhoades..." he said cautiously, his eyes not moving from the choke marks around my neck. Caden's eyes followed his until they too widened in alarm at the sight of my neck.

"Eora what happened?" he asked in a hushed voice, not able to tear his eyes away from the apparently horrific marks on my skin.

My raspy breaths kept coming in short, airy gasps and while the light-headedness and the dizziness had faded my voice still seemed to be failing me. I tried to mouth the words over and over but nothing seemed to be coming out. After a few measly attempts I managed to get out one word that I knew would get them into action and I pointed back in the direction that I had come from.

"An-Angora."

Caden's brow became hard and furrowed as he put two and two together and that occasional rage that I saw in Caden started to show in his eyes. Jett looked startled but managed to keep his head on straight and quickly grabbed his shoge out from his back pocket. He looked at me and helped me up out of Caden's arms, pressing one of my knives into my hand.

"Alone?" he asked as Caden drew his huge broadsword out of it's sheath.

I shook my head and raised one finger to symbol that there was one other person with her. Jett nodded in understanding.

"Tripp?"

I nodded my head as I curled my fingers around the knife he had given me. I had lost one when I drove it into Angora's foot, and while I could think of no better use for a knife it meant that I was down one. That was okay, I only needed two to fight with, and I had five.

"Good," Jett said with an almost malicious grin, "That means we'll have two against three. We should be able to take at least one of them down no problem."

"Are you insane," Caden hissed across to Jett, "She can't fight like this. Just look at her, she can barely breathe!"

Jett gave Caden an annoyed look, "It's that or sit down and wait to get attacked. Which would you prefer her to do?"

"Not if we keep them away from her-" Caden continued on stubbornly but I quickly cut in.

"Caden," I said, hating how weak and airy my voice sounded, "Let me do this. I won't sit out while you two fight. Let me do this."

He gave me a pained look, and while I knew that what he wanted more than anything was to keep me as far away from the two of them as possible, there was no way in hell I was going to let him fight without me standing there right beside him. I looked into those gorgeous blue eyes I loved so much and hoped that my pleading would get through to him, because I was going to fight whether he wanted me there or not.

But he didn't get the chance to make any kind of decision, because in that moment Tripp crashed out into the open, running at his full pace even with that limp of his, but he came to a very quick stop when he realised that he was facing three people rather than one.

I was about to make a move against him while he was on his own but we didn't have time, as seconds after Tripp was in our view Angora emerged from behind him. Her eyes focused in immediately on Caden, the rest of us becoming inconsequential and obsolete, and she headed straight out towards him, her mace held out in front of her in a threatening position. I couldn't see what happened after then because almost instantaneously Tripp thrust his spear out towards me, aiming dead on my heart. I jumped out of the way a second before it would have pierced my skin, giving Jett the opening to trap the spear in the chain of his shoge and snap it in half.

Tripp looked absolutely furious as his only weapon got broken in two, but he managed to keep hold of the spear-headed half and took another lunge at me. Using my knives to form an X-shaped defence, I blocked the blow to the left before jabbing out towards his arm and missing by a fraction. But by shifting his weight to the left I made him stumble, which gave me the opening to kick him dead in the middle of the stomach and knock all the wind from him. He doubled over in pain, heaving as he tried to regain some breath. Jett picked up the hilt of his shoge and used it as a club to bash into the back of Tripp's skull, causing him to fall face first into the snow. Jett raised his shoge up above Tripp's neck and was about to plunge it into his flesh when Tripp's arm shot out and his hand locked around Jett's ankle, before he pulled back and sent Jett crashing to the ground as well. Tripp then raised the spearhead up, bracing to stab Jett while he was down but I launched one of my knives out towards him, hitting Tripp's hand square in the centre. He roared out in pain as he turned around to face me, now holding the broken spear with his left hand rather than his right. He gave me a hate filled glare as he lunged towards me, but I had learnt by now not to let myself get into a fist-fight with Tripp, he was considerably bigger and stronger than me and last time I had left the fight with a few too many bruises for my liking. Instead I ducked under him and slashed my knife out across his stomach, causing him to reel in agony.

Jett was back up on his feet, standing behind Tripp, and was braced for the killing blow when I saw a mace coming towards him out of the corner of my eye. I was about to use what little voice I had to shout out at him to duck but luckily he saw it as well and managed to lurch out of the path of the monstrous weapon in time. He then turned around to face Angora, who was once again locked in a death match with Caden, and yet they were so evenly matched that neither one had managed to land a blow on the other. But now Jett's focus was on her, and all of a sudden the tables in that fight had dramatically turned in our favour. Unfortunately, it meant that my fight just became drastically more even handed. Crap.

Tripp may have been injured and in pain but I was still feeling pretty weak from being strangled not so long ago. Plus as previously mentioned he was a good foot taller than me and a good fifty pounds heavier than me, which would probably tip the scales a little more in his favour. But there was no chance in hell I was going to let him take me down without a fight, not after everything the two of us had been through. He turned back around to face me, his injured hand softly pressing against the wound along his front, the other holding his spear out in front of him. He didn't look like the tall, strong, arrogant career I'd met on that second day of training. He looked like a wounded sixteen year old boy, the same age as me, who was suddenly terrified of a girl half his size. It shocked me, to see him in this human way all of a sudden, but I didn't want to think of him as a person any more. Instead I tried to remember the look on Kaia's face, the sound of her agonised cry when he had shot an arrow right through her heart. He had used Kaia's weaknesses against her then, and I planned on doing the same thing to him now.

I knew what his weaknesses were: an injured hand, a knife wound to the stomach, a previously dislocated knee and a prior stab wound to the thigh that could not have healed by now. And my weaknesses: a stab wound to the stomach, a recent choking and being generally smaller and lighter in stature. As we both stood there sizing each other up a plan of attack clicked in my brain, almost like I could physically visualise how to use his weaknesses against him while defending mine.

With as much strength as I could muster up, I quickly shot a knife out towards his stomach. As you would have expected he dodged to the side the moment he saw the knife flying through the air, which was precisely what I had anticipated. Using his attention on the knife to my advantage I ran towards him and swung my leg out, kicking the back of his knee with so much direct pressure that I physically felt his kneecap dislocate. He screamed out in anguish, who can blame the guy he just had his freaking patellar bashed out of place, and his hands mechanically dove to his now very swollen knee. He crumpled to the ground, no longer physically able to stand.

This was my shot, the one chance I would get to take him out for good, but I hesitated. As I held my knife above him the enormity of what it meant to do this seemed to hit me square across the face. The simple atrocity at what it meant to take a human life was what held my knife suspended in the air as I gazed down at that pain-stricken boy beneath me. I wasn't a killer; I'd never pretended to be one. Simply the thought of murdering anyone used to be absolutely unfathomable to me, and yet look at me now. Would the girl I was three weeks ago even recognise this person, the one who so easily contemplated stealing the life of another? I mean sure, I had been the one to finish of Dahlia, but she was already dying and in ridiculous amounts of pain when I had killed her, and in the end it had been pity that had made me draw that knife across her throat, not vengeance or anger. This was different, if I did this it was all me. But did I really have a choice? They'd taken away that choice when they sent me in here. I couldn't afford to let Tripp live, not if I wanted to be able to get myself, Caden or Jett home.

I took in a deep breath as I gripped onto my knife so tight it was making my hand hurt. Tripp looked up into my eyes, his wispy red hair falling over those little dark irises, and it was like the monster I had turned him into in my mind had disappeared and in his place was the scared young kid I had seen a glimpse of before. He could have been nice once, maybe he was really sweet and charming back home in district two. Maybe he was the kind of person I could have been friends with, or maybe not. I would never know now, not after all of this, not after I watched him run away after firing an arrow through my friend's heart.

"Please," he pleaded with me, not even bothering to try and struggle against me now. He had nothing left, there was no point in trying to fight me physically. He knew the only chance he had was to try and get me to see that this was wrong, that he was a person. And believe me, I knew it. The thing was, it was me or him, and I had to pick me.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, barely audible above the clashing of steel coming from behind me, "I'm sorry." And with that I quickly drove my knife into his chest.

He drew a quick intake of breath as the knife rapidly bled the life out of him, the look of anguish on his face only momentary. Within a few moments, the rise and fall of chest stopped and his eyelids closed. He was gone. Tripp was dead.

I looked down at Tripp's lifeless body and my bloodstained hands, and felt...miserable. How did our world end up like this? When did we become this screwed up? Why did humanity become such a disgustingly horrific species? What other species in the world would persecute and murder its own young, make them torture and murder each other? When did death become something humanity revelled in? I would never know, because this was my world, I had never known another one and I would never know another one. And now I was just one of the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of despicable people who had allowed this world to turn into what it had become. And yet I was going to keep going, if I had to I would kill Angora, Velvet, maybe even Davion though the thought made me feel sick, if it meant that Caden, Jett or I got to walk out of this hellhole alive.

"I'm so sorry," I say again to Tripp, even though I know that he is beyond hearing me now, "But this had to happen."

I tried vainly to wipe most of the blood off my hands onto his shirt, but it was pointless. His shirt was so drenched in blood that I was just making it worse, and after I pulled the knife out it was beyond useless. I didn't quite know what to do, I felt like I needed to do something, but the truth of the matter was that for the majority of the time I knew him I had hated Tripp with a passion. I was hardly the person to give him any kind of eulogy or something, not that I would have the faintest idea what to say anyway.

So instead I just sat there for a few, painful seconds just to let myself feel what I had done. To show whoever was watching that I was not some mindless murderess, that this had an effect on me. To let them see that despite the fact that I had despised the young ginger boy I had just murdered, despite the fact that from everything I had seen of him he was a terrible person, he didn't deserve to die. I looked up at the synthetic blue sky above me with a condemning glare and pointed one of my bloodstained fingers up at them. The message was crystal clear.

You did this.

But what was worse was it was still happening. Jett and Caden were still fighting Angora behind me, and when I joined them chances were that we would kill her, I mean she's good but she'd have to be some freaking god to beat three of us. And then there would only be two others we needed to get rid of before it was just the three of us. I hated how simple it was. But the fact of the matter was that it was that or let Caden, Jett and myself be killed, which was something I could not even comprehend. So, ignoring all the guilt and loathing inside myself I got back up onto my feet and turned around:

To see Angora standing right in front of me, her mace above her head, braced to bring it down and bash out my skull.

I didn't have the time to try and stop her, or even get out of her way. I just took a small, short breath and closed my eyes, praying that it would all be over relatively fast. But that mace never hit me.

I felt a pair of arms quickly wrap around me, one around my waist the other gently holding onto the back of my head. I felt my body pulled in towards the other's, being held so tightly, so securely that it was horribly obvious who it was that was holding me. I jerked my head up and looked at his face, taking in the look in his eyes that appeared to be a mixture of relief, fear and...resignation. And as I saw movement out of the corner of my eye I felt him exhale slightly as the muscles in his body tensed against mine, before everything around the two of us went deathly silent, and his gorgeous blue eyes lost their vivid, pure hue, looking empty and lifeless as they gazed down at me.

And I screamed as Caden's body collapsed in my arms and fell limply into the snow.

I dove down onto the ground next to him, almost refusing to believe how quickly this had happened, how suddenly he had cast himself between me and Angora, using himself as a human shield to block her blow. I never even had the time to process what he was doing, let alone stop him. From the edges of my vision I could see Jett get up from his fallen position on the snow and resume his attack on Angora but she was no longer anyway interested. She smiled viciously at the picture of Caden lying on the ground covered in his own blood, and finally content in her revenge, she fled off into the forest. Jett started after her but when he looked back and saw Caden and I he stopped in his tracks, his face suddenly very grave.

Caden looked up at me, his face paler than I had ever seen it and his breath short and hollow. He reached his hand up towards my face but I batted it away and immediately began opening my pack and searching for bandage. The look in his eyes was heartbreakingly compassionate as he began to speak.

"Hey-" he breathed weakly but I quickly shut him up, refusing to listen to whatever condoling message he was going to try and make me hear.

"It's okay, you're going to be fine," I said as I fished around the bottom of my bag looking for the god damn bandage.

"Eora..." Jett whispered, coming closer towards me, the tone in his voice sounding annoyingly defeated.

"We'll bandage you up and then the two of us will be able to stitch you up," I continued, ignoring Jett behind me. Caden looked at me sympathetically, the pain on his face becoming much more obvious. My throat was beginning to burn again, but not because of the choking, "Jett and I will be able to fix this."

"No we won't Eora," Jett said gently from beside me, "just look at his back."

I shook my head and held back the onslaught of emotions I knew was beating down at me but I couldn't help but gaze towards Caden's back, almost screaming again as I took in the sight of him. The skin on his back was almost completely shredded, the flesh torn where Angora's mace had been drawn down his back. It was so deep in some areas that I could see the white of his spine and his shoulder blades. And the blood, there was so much blood, the bright red liquid staining so much of the pale snow beneath us.

I kept shaking my head, refusing to acknowledge what was right in front of my eyes. He cannot die.

"We have to do something," I shouted back at Jett, "we have to try! I can't just leave him here to-" I refused to say the word.

Caden reached up and lightly took my head in his hands and tried to turn me back so we were eye to eye.

"Hey," he whispered gently, "Look at me."

I kept shaking my head. This is not happening. He cannot die.

"Look at me Eora."

I slowly turned my face back so that I was looking into Caden's, a single tear rolling down my cheek. He moved his finger so that he could brush it off my face before speaking.

"It's going to be okay," he breathed, smiling at me so tenderly it was all I could do not to shriek, "I'm going to be okay."

"Don't say that," I said in a choking voice, "it's not going to be okay. Not if you-" I still wouldn't say it. Even though I could see him slipping away in front of my very eyes I would not even begin to fathom the idea of losing him now. Not after I had just realised how much I needed him. How much I loved him.

"This is always what had to happen," he said as he gently stroked the side of my cheek.

"No," I kept shaking my head, "No it's not. You can't-I can't-" I couldn't breathe, and once again it had nothing to do with the crushed windpipe. My head fell and my voice turned into an almost inaudible murmur, "How am I supposed to do this without you?"

"Listen to me, you're fast, you're smart and you're strong. You can win this thing, I know you can," he looked so sure in himself and in me that it was tearing at my heart, "You don't need me."

"You're wrong, you're so wrong," my voice was cracking with every word, the misery in me beginning to spill over, "Please Caden, please stay with me."

His eyes were glassy as well now, and though he was doing his best to hide it I could see he was in terrible amounts of pain, "I wish I could. But it could only ever be one of us that made it out of here. I wouldn't have been able to do it if you were gone, but you'll be fine without me."

I paused. "You were never going to honour our deal were you," I asked but not accusingly, just in a way that showed I finally understood.

He gently tried to shake his head but I put one of my hands against his cheek to stop him. The last thing he needed to be doing right now was move.

"No, I would have honoured it," he rebutted, "But our deal was that I would try to win if you died first, and I was never going to let that happen. It was always going to be me who died first."

"No," I demanded again, not willing to accept how resined he was to death, "Please Caden. I-" I stopped, the words caught in my mouth. The words I had been so desperate to tell him yesterday now seemed like they were aflame on my tongue.

Another long tear began to stream down my face as I looked up into his eyes, and in a soft, gentle voice I managed to breathe out, "I love you."

His eyes widened in shock, but at the same time his whole face seemed to glow as he once again took my face in his hands and stroked away the hair that had fallen around my face. He looked at me with a mixture of compassion and sympathy but he couldn't manage to keep a radiant smile off of his lips.

"I didn't want that," he said in a choked voice, "I never planned for you to fall for me."

The absolute ecstasy and joy in his smile was so damn infectious that I began to smile despite the tears running down my face, "Then why are you smiling?"

"Because," He took a deep breath and as he took one of my tiny, bloodstained hands in his I could feel him shaking, "I've wanted to hear you say those three words to me since I was thirteen years old."

I lay my head down against his chest, trying to bury myself in his scent just so I could fool myself into thinking he wasn't about to die, "Please don't leave me here," I begged him softly, "I love you. Stay with me."

"You have to win this Eora," he breathed against my ear, "Please win this thing, and then go home, back to your sisters."

I kept shaking my head, "Not if it means you can't be there with me."

I felt him lightly press his lips against my temple and then felt something small and cold being pressed into the palm of my hand.

"When you win, can you give this back to my brother for me," he asked gently, his eyes suddenly watery, "I promised him he'd get it back when he gave it to me."

I looked down at my hand and saw a small silver medallion sitting in my palm, cold and hard against my skin. I nodded against him, my throat tight as I tried to keep back everything that was fighting inside of me, clawing at me to get out. I sat back up and looked into his clear blue eyes once more before leaning down and gently pressing my lips against his. He softly pulled me in closer towards him and I lightly wrapped my arms around his neck. As I pulled away from him I leant back down with my head on his shoulder, a few inches from his ear, and whispered, "I love you," into his ear.

"I love you," he said back softly

"I love you."

"I love you."

I don't know how long the two of us lay there, whispering those three words to each other over and over again in the cold, wintery air. I kept my arms around Caden's neck, tethering my entire world to the sound of his heart beating underneath his chest. Every time the words came out of his mouth they were fainter than the last time, and his skin was becoming colder and paler with each passing second. With each moment I felt the absolute anguish begin to creep up on me even more, making every choked breath feel like I was inhaling lead. And then, after an immeasurable number of agonising seconds, I couldn't hear his heartbeat anymore.

I looked up at his face and saw that his eyelids were shut and his face was hard and emotionless, almost like he was asleep. But Caden had never looked like that when he had slept, he had always looked so animated, so enthralling in his sleep. Now he just looked empty, void...lifeless.

"Caden," I said, sitting back up onto my knees next to him and gently shaking him. His eyes didn't open, nor did his face suddenly warm and fill with emotion.

"Caden," the volume of my voice raised and I began shaking his prone form even harder, "Caden wake up!"

No matter how hard I shook him he didn't move, his body giving no reaction to my touch or my voice.

"Caden!" I screamed, refusing to let myself believe he was gone. I kept trying to get some kind of reaction out of him but it was useless. I fell across his body and started pounding my fists against his chest, water running down my face and my heart pounding against my ribs, "Caden wake up," I sobbed into his chest, "Please wake up."

"Eora," Jett breathed from behind me, "He's not going to wake up. He's gone. Caden's dead."

With Jett's words the mental blockade I had forged against my emotions crumbled and the grief immediately washed over me. And for the first time since that first day when Velvet had stabbed me, I cried. I couldn't feel anything besides the overwhelming pain and the absolute melancholy that were consuming every single fibre of me and I couldn't hold back the onslaught of tears streaming from my face. I bawled non-stop against him, my arms back around his neck drawing his lifeless corpse in closer towards me, trying to hold onto the image of the life-filled boy I loved as my heart bled. Every single inch of me ached and burned inside of me, like someone was clawing at my heart. I couldn't breathe without making some terrible choking noise as my utter despair wept out of me.

Jett came up behind me and softly brushed the back of my hair, "Eora, we need to leave. You can't stay here like this."

As he gently started pulling me away I held on tighter to Caden's prone corpse and screamed back at him.

"No!" I screamed, my arms locking around Caden's chest, "They can't take him! They can't have him! He's not theirs," I sobbed into Caden's skin, "He's not theirs."

Jett let me cry against Caden for a few more moments before he came up and scooped my limp body up into his arms and held me against him, letting me weep on his shirt. I twisted the material of his shirt in my grip and beat against his chest as I wailed against him, murmuring over and over, "He's not theirs. They can't take him. He's not theirs."

Jett stroked my hair and kept talking to me in a soothing voice, trying desperately to calm me down, but it was no use. I had broken now, every inch of me beyond repair. But despite the fact that I was bawling my eyes out over the boy he knew I loved, Jett was still there. He began murmuring into my hair, "No, he's not theirs. He yours, they will never take him away from you."

He turned me away from Caden's corpse and sat down against a tree, cradling my hysterical form in his arms and gently trying to soothe me. But nothing worked; I just lay against him and cried. I cried until there were simply no tears left and even then I continued to cry. Nothing anyone could do or say could distract me from the fact that Caden was dead. The boy that I loved was gone and I would never see him again.

And it was entirely my fault.

A/N: Alright so I am expecting an awful lot of hate for this, but you all knew it had to happen at some point, and believe me I am just as heartbroken as all of you, even though I've had the time to process it. I know that pretty much all of you were rooting for what some of you have called "Ceora" (which I think is awesome by the way) but this was always how it was supposed to end. A lot of you have asked if after I finish this I would write an alternate ending or something where Caden and Eora get to live happily ever after so even though I hadn't really had anything planned I am tossing around some ideas for one.

So hopefully you all stick around to see who will be the Victor of the 58th Hunger Games, even though one of your favourite tributes has just died. We're down to the final five so we're nearly there everyone. Thanks for sticking around for so long and I'll see you all soon!

xxC