Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Wren didn't know anything was wrong, because she didn't think anything was wrong. No one she knew, no one Luke knew, would think anything bad happened here. These men were bad, and these children belonged to someone, and they were selling bricks and bricks and bricks of white. These men, they would have killed Saint, they would have killed her, and just because they'd walked down the wrong alley trying to help a boy with no shoes.
Non. There was nothing wrong here. Thomas wouldn't think it, and Jack wouldn't think it. Evie wouldn't think it. The vigilantes in this city wouldn't think it, and while she was proud of Luke for not killing the men, she wouldn't have minded if every last one of them ended up dead. Because the children on the pallets had no shoes, they had no lives. Anyone who would let children be like that wasn't good.
Maybe that wasn't Saint's view of the world. Maybe he looked through his lens and saw pretty and good amid the filth of the city. But Wren knew better. She knew these men couldn't be trusted, and she knew how these places worked. She knew what the lives of the children on the pallet would have become, the horrors they would suffer on their backs and on their knees, and then new children would come, and it would all begin again.
She knew. She knew it wasn't wrong.
She listened as Luke spoke to Saint. She listened as Saint said he would take the children. She thought the little boy Saint was speaking to did have a choice. If the little boy edged back, if he said non, Wren would respect that and find another way. But she'd been a child without a choice, and she remembered the taste of it on her tongue.
But what Luke said next, that was important. So important, and she blinked her wide grey eyes at Saint while Luke tried to eek out the promise from the other man. "He won't tell. He knows better. Don't you, Saint?" she asked.
Luke had asked for a promise with that spark in his eye; Wren was all spark. Even quiet, the threat was unmistakable. She would kill for this, and she would sleep quiet and dreamless in her bed after, and it was best if Saint knew that.