Page 32 of Cannon (King Family Saga #3)

Cannon

I stared at her hands as she finished wrapping the gauze around my knuckles, feeling naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothes.

Something in my chest tightened, a pressure building behind my ribs that made it hard to breathe.

I’d just laid out my whole fucked-up life story for this woman, shit I hadn’t told anyone since getting out.

Not about my dad’s murder, not about my relationship with Smoke, and definitely not about my half-brothers.

Hell, the only person who knew was Reese.

Why the fuck had I done that?

“Are you okay?” Queen asked, her voice soft as she tucked the end of the gauze under the wrap.

I pulled my hand back, flexing my fingers, testing the bandage. Too gentle. Too careful. Like I was something that needed protecting instead of the other way around.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended. “It’s fine.”

The silence stretched between us, heavy with all the shit I’d just spilled. I felt exposed, raw, like I’d peeled back my skin and let her see all the ugly underneath. I needed to get control back, needed to shift this energy before I started feeling even more shit I didn’t want to feel.

“So what about you?” I asked, leaning back against the bathroom wall. “You know all my trauma now. Fair’s fair.”

Queen laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You want my sad story? Trust me, it’s not as interesting as finding out you’re related to the King dynasty.”

“Try me,” I pressed, watching her face carefully. “You’ve seen my scars. Show me yours.”

She stood up, smoothing down her leggings in that nervous way women do when they’re stalling. For a second I thought she might shut me down, tell me to mind my business. Instead, she leaned against the sink, arms crossed over her chest like armor.

“My mother,” she began, her voice steady but distant, “was what the doctors now call bipolar with borderline personality disorder. Back then, we just called her crazy.”

I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

“She was…and still is, emotionally unstable. We moved constantly. Every few months, a new city, a new apartment, new names sometimes. She was always running from something; debt collectors, people she scammed, her own demons.” Queen’s eyes had that faraway look, seeing ghosts from her past. “By the time I was twelve, I’d lived in fifteen different cities. ”

“That’s rough,” I said, understanding the constant uprooting better than most. After my dad died, we’d bounced around too, eviction to eviction.

Queen laughed again, that same hollow sound. “That wasn’t even the worst part. My mother was a con artist, and I was her favorite prop.”

She paused, seeming to weigh how much to tell me. I stayed quiet, giving her space to find the words.

“Her most profitable con was the cancer scam,” she finally continued. “She’d move us to a new town, join a church or community group, and introduce me as her daughter who was battling leukemia.”

My stomach turned as I began to understand what she was saying.

“She kept my head shaved, my eyebrows too. Wouldn’t feed me properly so I’d stay thin and sickly-looking.

She’d put dark makeup under my eyes, teach me to walk slow, to look weak.

” Queen’s voice remained steady, but her fingers dug into her arms. “I’d have to pretend to be exhausted all the time, to throw up after meals sometimes.

If I broke character, even for a minute, she’d punish me later. ”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, anger building in my chest for the little girl she’d been. “How long did that go on?”

“Until I was sixteen. By then I’d gotten too tall, started developing.

Couldn’t pass for a sick child anymore. Younger kids are more sympathetic and by sixteen I was able to rebel.

I wouldn’t allow her to use me in that way.

” She shrugged like it was nothing, but I could see the pain she was trying to hide.

“So she switched to other cons. Fake accidents, insurance scams, whatever worked.”

I stood up, moving closer to her, drawn by some need to erase the distance between us. “What about when she wasn’t running cons? What was she like then?”

Queen’s mask slipped just a little, showing a flash of the hurt beneath. “When she wasn’t on a high, planning and executing her schemes, she’d crash. Hard. She’d stay in bed for weeks, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t bathe, wouldn’t speak sometimes.”

“And you took care of her,” I said, not a question but a certainty. I could see it in her eyes, the responsibility that had been forced on her too young.

“Someone had to,” she replied simply. “I’d bathe her when she couldn’t move, feed her when she wouldn’t eat, pay the bills with whatever money I could find or make. By thirteen, I could forge her signature perfectly. Had to, to keep the lights on.”

The image hit me hard, Queen as a child, bathing her grown mother, feeding her, carrying a burden no kid should have to carry. It explained so much about her now, the need for control, the fierce independence, the way she mothered everyone around her, even me sometimes.

“Sounds like we both had some crazy-ass mothers,” I said, trying to lighten the heaviness that had settled between us.

She smiled then, a real one that reached her eyes. “Yeah, just different flavors of crazy.”

“Mine drank herself to death by the time I was seventeen,” I offered. “Reese and I came home one day and found her face-down in her own vomit.”

“Mine’s still alive,” Queen said with a sigh. “Still running the same old scams when she can. Still calling me when she needs bailing out.”

I reached for her hand without thinking, my bandaged fingers wrapping around hers. “That’s why you’re so good with ZaZa? You’ve had practice taking care of someone with mental health issues.”

She looked down at our joined hands, then back up at me. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just trying not to repeat my mother’s mistakes. ZaZa deserves better than what I had.”

“She’s lucky to have you,” I said, meaning it. Queen was a fighter, a survivor. Like me.

“Sometimes I think I’m not enough,” she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper. “Sometimes I’m terrified I’ll fail her the way my mother failed me.”

I stepped closer, lifting her chin with my free hand. “You won’t. You’re nothing like your mother.”

She leaned into my touch, her eyes searching mine. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I see you,” I said simply. “The real you. Not just the boss bitch who runs the club. The woman who bandages my knuckles and worries about her daughter and doesn’t let anyone see how scared she is.”

Something shifted in her eyes then, a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before. It matched the strange exposure I felt, like we were both standing there with our souls bare, all our ugliness and damage laid out between us.

It scared the shit out of me, this feeling.

More than Smoke, more than prison, more than anything I’d faced before.

Because I’d spent my whole life building walls, keeping people at a distance, never letting anyone close enough to hurt me.

And somehow, in the span of a few days, this woman had slipped past every defense.

“We’re a fucked-up pair, aren’t we?” she said with a soft laugh.

I nodded, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw. “The most fucked-up.”

But even as I said it, I knew there was something else happening here. Something beyond the sex, beyond the shared trauma. Something that felt dangerously like belonging.

And for a man like me, belonging was the most dangerous thing of all.

She held my gaze for a moment, then looked away. There was something else lurking behind her eyes, something darker than the pain she’d already shared. I’d interrogated enough people to recognize when someone was holding back.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice low. “There’s something else.”

Queen shook her head, pushing away from the sink like she was ready to end this conversation. “I should check on ZaZa.”

I caught her wrist before she could leave, gentle but firm. “Don’t do that. Don’t run from me.”

“I’m not running,” she said, but wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Look at me,” I demanded, and when she finally did, I saw it, raw guilt swimming in those dark gorgeous eyes. “Tell me.”

She exhaled slowly, her shoulders slumping. “There are some things you can’t come back from, Cannon. Things that change who you are forever.”

“Try me.”

Queen leaned back against the sink, gripping its edge like she needed the support. “I killed someone when I was eleven.”

The confession hung between us, but I didn’t flinch. I’d been expecting something dark, we all carried our demons. But the pain in her eyes told me this was worse than I’d imagined. I’d killed someone at fourteen too. The nigga that killed my father.

“It was in North Carolina,” she continued, her voice distant. “One of our longer cons had paid off big. For once, my mother had splurged on two hotel rooms, said I deserved my own space.”

I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

“In the middle of the night, I heard screaming from her room. Terrified screaming. I grabbed the gun she always had me keep and ran next door.”

I could picture it…a tween Queen, terrified, holding a weapon too heavy for her small hands.

“When I burst in, I saw a man on top of her. She was fighting, crying…” Her voice cracked. “She saw me and screamed, ‘Kill him, Queen! He’s trying to rape me!’ So I did. I shot him in the head.”

“Fuck,” I whispered, understanding washing over me.

“His name was Alfred Dixon. He owned that hotel.” She closed her eyes, like she could still see his face.

“After he was dead, my mother just… changed. Started rifling through his pockets, took his keys. She cleaned out the hotel safe, stole cash from the registers. It wasn’t until I saw her stealing that I realized—”

“She set him up,” I finished for her. “Set you both up.”

Queen nodded, a single tear escaping down her cheek. “She used me to murder an innocent man so she could rob the place. We were three states away before I even processed what happened.”

I reached for her, pulling her against my chest. She resisted at first, then melted into me, her body trembling.

“I’ve carried that with me every day since then,” she whispered against my chest. “Every single day, I see his face when I close my eyes. I killed an innocent man because I trusted my mother’s word without question.”

I held her tighter, feeling her tears dampen my shirt.

Something twisted in my gut, a memory trying to surface.

Gage’s face as I cornered him in that parking garage, the way he’d pleaded, swearing he’d never hit Reese, that she was lying about the abuse.

The bruise had looked real enough, but what if… ?

I pushed the thought away hard. No. Reese wouldn’t lie about something like that. Not to me. Not to get someone killed.

“Listen to me,” I said, pulling back just enough to look into Queen’s eyes. “That’s not your cross to carry. That’s your mother’s sin, not yours.”

“But I pulled the trigger,” she argued, her voice breaking.

“You were protecting your mother. You were a child who thought someone you loved was in danger.” I cupped her face in my bandaged hands. “Any one of us would’ve done the same thing.”

She shook her head, not believing me. “I should’ve known better. She’d used me so many times before—”

“Stop,” I cut her off. “You meant well. You were being a protector. That’s who you are, you protect the people you care about, even when they don’t deserve it.”

Queen’s shoulders sagged as years of guilt seemed to weigh her down. I recognized that burden; I’d carried similar ones.

“But now,” I continued, my voice dropping lower, “it’s time to let someone else protect you for a change.”

She looked up at me, confusion and something like hope flickering in her eyes. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying let me carry this for you. I’m handling Smoke. Let me be the one who makes sure nothing touches what’s mine.” The possessiveness in my voice surprised even me, but I meant every word. “You’ve been fighting alone long enough, Queen.”

“I don’t know how to stop fighting,” she admitted, her voice small. “I don’t know how to let someone else take control.”

“I’m not asking you to stop being who you are,” I said, brushing a tear from her cheek with my thumb. “Just make room for me to stand beside you. Behind you when you need backup. In front of you when there’s danger.”

She closed her eyes, leaning into my touch. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“Of letting someone in. Of trusting someone else to have my back.” Her eyes opened, raw with honesty. “Every time I’ve trusted someone, they’ve either betrayed me or left me.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” I promised, and I meant it more than I’d meant anything in a long time. And that shook me to my core.