“Her car? Steal her car?”

“Right out of the driveway. He was twelve. He’d run away from home and was planning on going to Mexico.”

“At twelve he was stealing cars with plans to go to Mexico.”

“That’s right. The first of the Quinn bad boys.” He lifted his glass to toast his absent sibling. “He’d been beaten, again, by his drunk father, and he’d figured it was time to run or die.”

“Oh.” She braced a hand on the arm of the sofa as she lowered herself again.

“He passed out, and my father carried him inside. My mother treated him.”

“They didn’t call the police?”

“No. Cam was terrified, and my mother recognized the signs of continual physical abuse. They made inquiries, arrangements, worked with the system and circumvented it. And they gave him a home.”

“They just made him their son?”

“My mother said once that we were all hers already. We just hadn’t found each other before. Then there was Ethan. His mother was a hooker in Baltimore, a junkie. She relieved boredom by knocking him around. And then she got the bright idea that she could supplement her income by selling her eight-year-old son to perverts.”

Sybill clutched her glass in both hands and rocked. She said nothing, could say nothing.

“He had a few years of that. One night one of her customers finished with Ethan, and with her, and got violent. Since his target was her and not her kid, she objected. Stabbed him. She ran, and when the cops got there they took Ethan to the hospital. My mother was doing guest rounds.”

“They took him, too,” Sybill murmured.

“Yeah, that’s the long and short of it.”

She raised her glass, sipped slowly, watched him over the rim. She didn’t know the world he was describing. Logically, she knew it existed, but it had never touched hers. Until now. “And you?”

“My mother worked the Block in Baltimore. Strip joints, turned tricks on the side. A little bait and switch now and then, some short cons.” He shrugged. “My father was long gone. He did some time in Jessup for armed robbery, and when he got out he didn’t look us up.”

“Did she . . . did she beat you?”

“Now and then, until I got big enough, strong enough, that she worried I might hit back.” His smile was thin and sharp. “She was right to worry. We didn’t care for each other much. But if I wanted a roof over my head, and I did, I needed her, and I had to pull my weight. I picked pockets, lifted locks. I was pretty good at it. Hell,” he said with a faint stir of pride, “I was damn good at it. Still, I stuck with small shit. The kind you turn into easy cash or drugs. If things were really tight, I sold myself.”

He saw her eyes widen in shock, flick away from his.

“Survival’s not always pretty,” he said shortly. “Most of the time I had my freedom. I was tough, and I was mean, and I was smart. Maybe I got picked up once in a while and rattled through the system, but I always popped out again. Another few years of that life, and I’d have been in Jessup—or the morgue. Another few years of that life,” he continued, watching her face, “and Seth would have gone the same way.”