D4 :: Gunner La Torre

Live fast, die young. I was born to live for every second, a childhood of shooting off gunshots like firecrackers and playing boardgames with stacks of dirty cash instead of play money. Other kids might have grown up with mental scars over the kinds of things I've seen, but I was born for this. From my first breath, I was my father's daughter and nothing else. Maybe it's because my mum died in labor, the possibilities of her maternal influence leaving my life with the cease-fire of her heartbeat, but even if she were still here, I can't imagine I'd be so different. I fired my first gun at six and buried my first bullet in someone's brain at ten, my father standing beside me with a reassuring hand upon my small shoulder, keeping me steady and focused. None of that ever felt any more difficult than learning the alphabet or how to roll a joint, but my father's minions don't fail to look impressed by the way I never miss the mark when I've got steel pressed into my palm. My aim has always been as dead on as a last breath.

The Capitol makes it easy, allowing the Training Centers to supply us with all kinds of weapons. The Games I play for aren't theirs, but I still walked in their doors with a cocky smirk, familiarizing myself with the weight of a throwing knife in my hand and ten thousand ways to kill a man twice my size. There's an art to the simplicity of a blade, but I still prefer the bucking recoil of a gun, an explosion of blazing power reigned in by that tiny little trigger. My trainers always told my pops I was a natural at death, as if this were something he didn't already know... as if this were something they didn't already know from the moment they saw the name La Torre on their registry.

A family name like mine is not a secret, but a declaration. We do not live quietly, just carefully, always one step ahead of the Peacekeepers that watch us intently, waiting for a misstep. However, my feet are just as steady on the path I follow as the man who raised me, walking a line drawn by shadows with enough flashy swagger to make the authorities scream in frustration. Pops calls them the PKKK, mocking the white uniforms that would love nothing more than to see us hanging from the end of a rope. He says the world has always been this way and that I shouldn't be afraid of people chasing after me, because greatness will always attract followers. I believe him. I've seen men die in all sorts of gruesome ways, begging for mercy with their last words, and I won't go out like that.

Instead I flip my hair with confidence as I walk the streets, unashamed of daylight, a vision of neon and hoodrat riches. Despite layers of gold chains around my neck and a gaudy, Capitolite-mocking style that instantly marks me as an underworld high roller, I always hear that I look like my mother: rich toffee skin, a mouth big enough to tell off even the likes of my pops, and a mess of dark, thick waves falling to my collarbone, as unchecked and mussed up as my morals. Sometimes I catch my father looking at me with the kind of excruciating confession of a smile that tells me he's still not over my mother and that the more I grow into a replica of her image, the harder it gets for him to look at me.

Despite that, I know he doesn't hate me for her death. In the beginning he may have been disappointed I wasn't a boy — naming me as if that might be enough to turn me into the son he would never have — but you won't find a prouder poppy than mine. That pride goes both ways. What he has given me throughout my life hasn't gone unappreciated, no matter the means, and I will never be like some of the ungrateful children of privilege I've encountered around here who think mummy and daddy's money is the root of all evil, even though there are plenty of people around these parts who might argue that mine actually is. Woe is your precious little aristocratic life. In school, they tended to look at me like I was filth tracked in on the bottom of their shoes, but I knew a few tricks — or ten thousand — for setting them straight. Thankfully all of them learned quickly, so I never had to waste too much time with petty schoolyard feuds. I've always had better things to do.

Heir to the empire of one of the most infamous drug lords, I've been groomed to wield power and fear from the start. However, the past is nothing in comparison to the what the future is about to bring. There has always been one sort of competition or another, be it the relatively harmless Vespolis or the small, but relentless influence of the Ferry Man's operations. However, our aspirations are more widely spread than their imaginations, crossing District lines to reach out with an open hand for the infinite possibilities of Six's resources. Originally, my father had planned to tap into the prescription drug trade, but instead he wound up crossing paths with a girl cooking chemicals in her kitchen. Now, we're set to dominate these streets like never before, all thanks to a little bit of unexpected science.

My pops passed the crown to me before he left to secure our connections in Six, leaving all of the trafficking operations in my hands while setting up an import system for the purest ice the glassheads around here have ever tasted. I'm the queen of a drug revolution, a new era of blazing senses and shivering bones, and I'm wearing diamonds the likes of which you've never seen before, literally — crystal meth, cut and set like jewels into a chain of gold. The Peacekeepers around here are so useless they can't tell the difference, even when I'm standing right in front of them with all the evidence they'd ever need to put me away strung around my neck. Bling bling, bitches. Life's not worth it if you're not willing to have a little fun with people.

Fun is exactly what brings me out to the clubs at night, knocking elbows with my competition, a secret hidden in my smile over the way I'm about to turn their worlds upside-down. From the start I've always occupied a VIP seat behind the underworld's velvet rope, strictly signifying me as someone not to be fucked with, but little do they know that I'm about to turn that shady booth into a throne. All that's left to do now is pop a bottle and laugh as heads duck from the echo of the bang. Bad girls do it well.