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prologue
LOCK AND KEY

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They say Vixen's grandmother, Sable Isolde, was a cold-blooded bitch. Skin worn like leather, murky, clouded eyes swirling with thunderstorms, and poison dripping from her viper tongue, she was a woman many in the herding town of Vaquero knew not to cross. So when they would come to her Mercantile, passed over to her in her husband's will after his– of course – mysterious and sudden death, it was nothing but pleasantries and nervous smiles. Even at the ripe age of six, sitting on that counter every afternoon after school with her sister, Vixen was able to differentiate when those were acting out of genuine respect and pure terror.

The only person who wasn't afraid of old Sable was Vixen's father. Love drove Destry Mince to defy the cantankerous woman when he proposed to her daughter Rosette as a low-level cow hand. Eventually working his way up to the lead herder of Vaquero's largest cattle ranch, Destry would resolve the woman's pretentious hatred to unimpressed indifference. Either way, he was providing for his Town-born wife and their two beautiful daughters, and Rosette was still able to work at the Mercantile alongside her mother with a sense of purpose. Merona and Vixen always had the best dresses, plenty of food in their bellies, and close relations with the children of all the right families their grandmother whispered to them to play with on the playground.

Much to her grandmother's dismay, Vixen still snuck away with her father, sun and wind beating against her skin as her father's laugh chorused with the pounding of horse's hooves. Even with a privileged life, she felt most free on those horseback rides with her father across the pastures. Besides her dirtying her dresses with mud and tangling up her carefully combed hair, all was well.

Until the accident.

It wasn't unheard of when it came to working with cattle, but it was still a massive shock when word passed through the town that of all people, Destry Mince had been violently bucked off his faithful horse. Suffering from severe brain trauma, the doctors confirmed everyone's worst fear. Bed-ridden, unable to speak, and unable to feed himself, Vixen watched her father deteriorate into the shell of a man she had admired her entire life.

With her mother now his full-time care-taker, the Mince family was back in Sable's talons and held under her careful eye even more than before. Merona and Vixen would be given jobs at the Mercantile along with an allowance to barely support their family so long as they played by their grandmother's rules. One of those rules included Merona being married off to the butcher's son for money, not for love. Vixen could feel the walls closing in on her, the pastures growing smaller and smaller, ribs tighter and tighter against her lungs.

So she broke them open anyway she could.

To her grandmother's knowledge, she worked at the Mercantile alternating days with her sister, the others dedicated to her studies and after-school curriculars. For Vixen, those after-school curriculars included following in her father's footsteps, competing to become the lead-herder of Vaquero's largest ranch. She saved every penny she ever earned. Stowed them away beneath a loose floorboard under her bed, counting down the days until she could break the cords that bound her and her family to Old Sable.

Her collection would look like a child's piggy bank after she was Reaped for the Fifty-Seventh Hunger Games and won. Unbound from her grandmother only to be tossed into another cage of different bearings, Vixen is now forced to find a new pick for a new lock.

And a former friend morphed into a rival she's now instructed to Mentor through a gory pageant of Death, otherwise known as Rafe Marrow, just might be the key she's been looking for.

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ahhh thanks for reading and i hope you enjoyed!!! please feel free to comment, i love hearing from you :)

so i've finally developed some hopefully solid backstories for my characters as well as deepend their plot more than i initially planned to, and let me tell you, it's going to be a WILD ride. i'm so excited to take this story where i'm planning as i don't think i've seen it too often in hunger games fics.

let me know what you think! it'll still collect some dust as die for you and the revenant have been my priorities lately, and i also want to continue to develop my ideas.

if you haven't already, feel free to check out my other hunger games works under the 'n' reading list-- that is my more recent writing. my friend and i share this account, but we don't write together! just share an account and write our own separate stories :)

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