"Get out from under the sign!" Felicity yelled. Finch knew her voice and moved at once. Giddy looked up instead, so Finch took him by the belt and dragged him backward as the steel frame came down. It landed between their boots. The kangaroo sat down hard, with Finch still holding his belt and every man in the street watching.
"I'm going to need you both to understand something," Rose called. "If you tear the street up over who gets to walk me home, I'll go home with the woman who actually looked up."
Finch let go of Giddy's pants, and the men on the roofs turned back to their posts. Voss had already moved Felicity out of range of the falling glass. He'd done it with an open hand at her elbow, and as soon as she had her balance, he'd let go. Beside her, Victor looked down at the place where the wolf's hand had been. The funny thing was that Felicity was thinking about that same spot herself.
Voss glanced toward Rose. "Did she know that was coming? I can't get a read on her the way I can on the rest of you."
"You could ask her. I met her on Tuesday, when she saved me from a man with scales who wanted to take me home in pieces." Felicity watched Rose make Finch open his hand to show her where the falling sign had nicked him. "If you're deciding which one of us is prey, I'd pick somebody on another street."
That got the first actual smile out of the wolf. She rather wished it hadn't. He had a crooked tooth that caught his lip on the way back down, and for one thoroughly inconvenient moment she wanted to see whether she could make him do it again.
A patrolman asked Voss where the women ought to go in the walking order. Voss passed the question to Victor, who answered that his wife would walk with him. The title landed somewhere under Felicity's ribs. Her last boyfriend had taken three months to clear a shelf in his bathroom. She'd known Victor two nights and had already acquired a jacket, a knife and a surprise marriage in front of ten armed witnesses. A toothbrush would have been nice.
"Did I miss part of last night?" she asked him. "I'm fairly sure I'd remember a wedding, even after the admittedly very good part."
Victor lost a little color under his tan. She had watched him catch a dead dog by the throat without so much as blinking. Apparently what frightened him was one woman asking him to explain himself. "You asked if I was yours, and I said yes. Wife was the word that fit what I meant. I should have tried it out on you before I tried it out on half the bloody street."
It would have been easier to tease him again. She had liked how it felt to be called his wife. She also liked that he stood there and took the question with his whole team listening. "You can use it," she said. "Next time I learn something important about my marriage, I'd like to find out slightly before the man with the tire iron."
The man in question developed a sudden interest in cleaning his tire iron. Victor held his hand out. Felicity threaded her fingers through his and kept them there when Voss asked, in much the same voice he might have used to ask about the weather, "First husband, then?"
She turned to him. "There's a number on that job?"
"Try standing at the front and the back of a column at the same time," Voss said. "That's what he's about to try to do. The men we've brought in from the river are already fighting over who gets to bring a woman food or sit next to her. A couple of those women picked more than one man they trusted, and the men found enough sense to work together. I figured I'd ask what you wanted before somebody else started making bets."
He said it like a man describing something he'd seen twice and was prepared to see again. Felicity could understand that better than a rule that had somehow been written in the two days since she'd gone for a jog. She could also see that he'd thought about the answer a good deal more than his tone suggested.
Victor's fingers tightened around hers, then loosened. It would have been easy to tell him there'd never be anyone else. He would have believed her, and she'd have been caught in her first lie to him before their first proper breakfast as husband and wife. The truth surprised her almost as much as the question.
"I don't know what I'll want later. Right now I want to get everybody down the street with all the parts we started with." She looked at Voss. "If I ever do want somebody else walking beside me, I can ask him myself."
"I'd like to see that," he said, so quietly she doubted anybody with ordinary ears would have heard. Victor had heard him. She felt the little laugh go through his fingers, although he didn't look terribly happy about it.
They walked with Victor on the street side and Rose behind them checking Finch's hand. Voss took the front. At every doorway where something might be waiting, he put himself between the opening and the people behind him without looking for an audience. She could see what Victor trusted him with. It unsettled her a little that she could also see what she might trust him with herself.
At the old brewery he held the side door for her. A board just inside carried a rough list of jobs and the names of the people assigned to them. The men he'd brought back had a place somewhere on that board, right down to the one cleaning blood off his crowbar. Felicity looked for a piece of charcoal.
"Do you want me to put you beside Victor?" Voss asked.
"I'd rather find out what happens if I put my own name down." She took the charcoal from his fingers. Behind the wall, where crates were being counted for the night, someone called out two different totals for the same supplies. Voss heard it too. He held the door wide, and this time he let her go in first.