Page 11 of Rehabbing the Beast
Danny winced. “Keep your voice down,” he warned. “And yes. Well, not a witchexactly, but close enough to make a lot of God-fearing Irish Catholics pretty damn uncomfortable, feel me?”
Seth felt the first tendrils of comprehension coursing through his mind, along with tactile remembrances of how it had felt when Quinn touched him. Until now, he’d thought the tingles and warmth stemmed from his feelings for her, but what if they hadn’t? What if it was something more, something he’d never considered?
“What does that have to do with Quinn?” he asked carefully.
Danny’s lips thinned and his voice lowered to almost inaudible levels. “Because she’s one, too.”
Seth’s hands curled into fists. “Is that why you all hate her?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Danny answered somberly. “For the record, I don’t hate Quinn.”
Seth noticed Danny didn’t even attempt to deny that his father and brothers did. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for Quinn, surrounded by that unrelenting animosity. No wonder she kept her personal life to herself.
“Then why?” Seth asked, fearing the answer was even worse than what he’d already heard.
Danny poured himself another glass and tossed it back. “They blame her for our mother’s death.”
Whatever Seth had been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. To say he was stunned was putting it mildly. His sweet, gentle Quinn? How could anyone believe for a moment she’d be capable of hurting anyone?
“Don’t look at me like that,” Danny muttered. “You have to understand—our mother was everything to my father. He worshipped the ground she walked on. She gave him four strapping sons without missing a beat, then suddenly she bleeds to death while giving birth to Quinn? No one expected that.”
Jesus Fucking Christ. The more he heard, the worse it got.
“My dad lost it, man. Went fucking batshit. We had to stay with relatives until he could get his shit together.” Danny paused, fingering the label on the bottle of Jack. “Finally, after a while, we came back home. Dad was functioning again. Said we needed to stick together, be a family. It’s what mom would have wanted.”
“None of us knew what to do with Quinn,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly. “She was so little. Dad said we had to be patient, warned us that babies cried a lot. But Quinn never cried. She’d just watch us with those big eyes of hers, like she was trying to make sense of us.”
“He tried, he really did, but sometimes Dad would just look at her and break down.” He looked at Seth. “That’s some scary shit, man, to see your old man lose it like that. And my brothers blamed Quinn for making him like that.”
“She was just a baby.”
“Yeah.” The sadness was back, the same kind of haunted look Seth sometimes saw in Quinn’s eyes when she thought no one was watching. He blew out a breath. “It only got worse when she started fixing shit.”
“Fixing shit? Like what?”
“Injured animals, us. We were always fucking around, getting hurt. And Quinn always fixed us.”
“And that made it worse?”
“Dad thought if she could fix us, she should have been able to fix Mom, too.”
“That’s fucking insane.”
Danny shrugged. “It is what it is. I protected her the best I could, man, but I couldn’t be there twenty-four-seven, you know? I took a lot of beatings because of it.”
“Did they hurt her?” His voice was so quiet, so deadly, he barely recognized it as his own.
Danny stared at the glass in his hand. “They knew they could get away with pushing her around because she never fought back. Not Dad, though. He never raised a hand to her. He just yelled at her a lot and said nasty shit. I think sometimes that hurt her more.”
“Not you.”
“No.” If Danny had answered ‘yes’, Seth wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him where he sat. As it was, it was taking every bit of his self-control to sit there and not run back to that house and beat every one of them to within an inch of their miserable lives.
“I’m the youngest, next to Quinn. The others, they remember our mother more than I do. Her death hit them harder than it did me.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Seth finally asked.
Danny shrugged again. He didn’t have an answer to that. Standing, he threw a couple of fives down on the table. “When you see her, tell her Danny-boy says hey, will ya?”
