Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Oh, Saint understood. That it wasn't a request. That Wren twisted into Luke as if they were not enough separately, as if they were something more together and said nothing bad had taken place here, as if the settled white dust were construction, or snow, or the papery petals of the park in mid-spring. His mind did not supply the worst-case scenario, or the expectation of what would happen if he did not comply with what was asked.
They were not dead. They were alive.
They knew it was wrong. But it didn't matter.
Saint didn't try to run. It didn't occur to him to do so, that running might resolve itself in safety. A cop who wore his uniform like he wore his honor: a little tarnished but whole and complete in it. He didn't see war in the room with the stacked pallets and the children who had hopelessness writ in their faces as they looked for where they might be expected to go, what they might be expected to do. He saw something less, something smaller and something dirtier, on which no values or honor might be won or lost. It was grubbier here, and the dealers who lay twitching in and out of consciousness were not the only ones with dirty hands.
Saint knew. He knew who it was who stood there, and he knew that Wren turned toward him and that it wasn't suggestion in her voice either. There was no black and white, the easiness of the developed negative. Luke was not aggressor, and wrong-doer. The violence had been absolved in Wren's voice, as completely as water soaked into cloth.
He acknowledged the truth of Luke's justification in the bow of his head. Yes, for Wren, it might not have been quick. He did not know. He did not know the men on the floor, he didn't know if they had been an annoyance, or if there had been an inkling of possibility when they'd taken the woman in the sun-drenched dress. That it was a likelihood did not go unacknowledged.
But it was a justification all the same. Saint looked at the children.
"I know some places." His voice was tired, his shoulders had slumped under the weight of what it was both of them had demanded he take with him. "I'll see them somewhere safely." He'd seen enough backs turned. Enough corruption bought with white powder overseas, enough small children who could not buy back childhood with borrowed guns, with graves dug too shallow for the sun.
Saint placed a hand, gentle, blood-spattered, on the shoulder-blade of the boy who'd began it all, the boy with no shoes. "Will you come with me?" he asked, soft and choice laid out in front of him, a pretense for a child who hadn't had choice at all.