Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Saint didn't offer a fight. It didn't occur to him to fight, notwithstanding the sharp-faced, impeccably dressed man who had once talked vaguely of spies and had resembled a sartorially dapper secretarial staff with whom he had run away from trouble that had dropped by the table, like an order a la carte. He didn't know Luke well enough to think of rescue as a blank page at the end of a book, a certainty. He didn't offer a word, and his face had gone pale and still as paper, but his eyes were bright and alert, and were taking in as much as it was possible to see while being marched along.
There were too many men for the boy and the handful of other children sitting on detritus. Too many men, and Saint's mind filed this as competently as it assessed the light and the warehouse environs, and flicked through the kind of pornography that wasn't shared with any legitimacy whatsoever, right the way through to drugs. The latter, probably: the boy had been loose, and confident in his mission. Saint put this together even as his camera was lost, and the memory card of each extracted.
"We can't fight," he said, his voice slow and reasonable, and his eyes heavy-lashed as he looked at the man with the ink that curled upward. "We thought he was sweet," he looked directly at the boy with the bare-feet, and at the same time was managing to appear (with difficulty, given length of limb) somehow smaller, and less intractable than the kind of person who might offer serious opposition. He sounded, Saint hoped, entirely too stupid to present a threat.