Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Wren was quiet. She was quiet as closets and white walls, and she wasn't afraid for herself. She wasn't even afraid for Saint, though she should be. Non, she was afraid for Luke, who would come home to emptiness after being called from the daycare or school, notice that Wren had not arrived, and she knew he would worry. He didn't need worry, and she knew he didn't need worry, and she'd wandered into bad without even realizing.
The man tore the camera from Saint's neck, and both cameras were smashed at the feet of the photographers. No words spoken yet, merely that destruction of proof, and Wren stared down and ignored the chafe-pain in the nape of her neck. Still quiet, and shhhh, no words as someone slid a hand along her back and down, one of the other men that rounded in front of them as Saint spoke.
She closed her eyes, and she hoped they listened to Saint. She hoped they believed nothing bad would happen if they allowed the interlopers to leave, quiet steps and unharmed. "I thought he might want shoes," she finally said, after Saint's last syllable, because she thought it would help.
One man laughed, and the other glared, and the pistol that was raised and cocked made Wren open her eyes, recognition of the sound and some innocent stupidity, as if seeing a bullet would make it less a bullet. But the man did not shoot. He used the gun to motion, there, to the pallets where the children were.
Wren stepped quiet, forward, forward, and she was shoved to her knees with a hand in her hair. Saint was treated more roughly, and neither man spoke to them.
It was the little boy, shoeless still, that held up a finger to his lips in a gesture of silence, and Wren was. She was silent, and their hands were bound behind their backs, rough and with yanks and jerks of painful rope.