Page 18 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

MELODY

T he next day crawled, slowly in the most agonizing way. I had never cared for time to pass until now. Until Enzo.

I moved through the laundry room like a ghost, arms on autopilot while my brain stuck on a reel I couldn’t switch off.

The washers thudded and spun. Steam hissed.

Bleach burned the inside of my nose. Every sheet I fed into the press flashed me back to white hotel linens bunched in my fists, breath caught high in my chest, Thrasher’s mouth at my ear, the feeling of everything inside me opening and frightening me at the same time.

I kept telling myself to stop thinking about it.

But memory didn’t care that I had towels to fold or that I’d already checked the dryer lint trap three times.

Memories kept cutting in—his palm at the back of my neck, gentle but sure; the rumble of his bike between my legs before that, when the ride changed from shaking and panic to this weird, bone-deep calm I’d never felt with anyone.

The way he’d looked down at me afterward, his expression cracking when he realized I was brand new to all of it.

Then came the moment he hooked into me like a fish taking the bait. The claim in his voice.

“No other man’s gonna taste what’s mine. You hear me? You’re it now.”

Mine.

No other man. That sentence lived in my chest now, scraping the bones of my ribs whenever I breathed.

By the time I clocked out, my shoulders ached and the back of my neck throbbed.

Outside, it was late Carolina afternoon—the kind that pressed warm and wet against my skin and made my hair stick to the back of my neck.

Whoever said the humidity in the South was a special Hell wasn’t lying.

The sun leaned low, turning everything a bruised gold.

The parking lot hummed with cicadas. Somewhere on the far side of the building, a bike revved and then cut.

The sound reached straight down my spine and lit up a hundred little nerves I didn’t know what to do with anymore.

Lyric was exactly where I figured she’d be—out back on the short strip of cracked concrete behind the hotel, where the building’s shade kept a little pocket of air cooler.

She had a water bottle balanced on her knee and a pen tucked behind her ear like she might start taking notes any second.

She was always like that—poised between running and staying in place, between humor and tears.

Seeing her steadied me the way watching a tide come in steadies the shore.

“There you are,” she said like we hadn’t spent the day within a hundred feet of each other.

She stood up and opened her arms. Although, I had to admit since Tiny had given her another room so they could have time together without interrupting my sleep, I did miss her.

I went into her open arms without thinking.

This was natural, normal. We were almost the same height; we’d been eye to eye since we were kids.

It felt like standing with my reflection in a mirror that didn’t judge.

“You okay?” she asked into my hair.

I breathed, catching the clean, cheap shampoo smell we both used because it was in the employee shower room. “Working,” I said. “You?”

“Also working.” She pulled back and searched my face. Her eyes narrowed a little. “And worrying. About you. You looked far away today.”

Far away. That was one way to put it. I tilted my head toward the curb under the half-dead oak tree. We took our usual spot, knees bumping, shoulders touching, the bark rough against my back. The cicadas filed our silence with their electric buzz.

Lyric rolled the bottle cap around on the concrete between her fingers. “Okay. I’ve been rehearsing this in my head, but I’m just going to say it.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “When I got with Tiny, it wasn’t about romance. It was a calculation.”

I blinked. She was brave to just lay it out like that. “A calculation.”

“Yeah.” The cap made a little click as she set it down.

“We walked into a hotel run by a motorcycle club. I didn’t know the rules, but I could tell they had them.

And the girls who were marked—belonging to somebody—looked…

safer. Less likely to get hassled. I thought, if someone like Tiny, if he wanted me, then maybe that meant people left me alone. Left you alone.”

My stomach pulled tight. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

She shrugged one shoulder, the shrug of someone who had done harder things and lived. “I know. But I’ve done worse for less. At least this time it was my choice.”

The word choice hung there like a bright flag in dirty wind.

We knew what it meant to not have a choice.

BJ’s shadow stretched all the way to South Carolina, even if we never said it out loud.

He’d taught her the shape of fear and how to fold herself into it.

Logan had taught me what it felt like to keep small, to keep quiet, to keep going until the day I ran because running was the only thing left.

Lyric looked down at her hands, at her fingers that were never without some small cut from kitchen prep. “But the thing is, it’s not a calculation anymore. I didn’t see it coming, but I…” She winced, and the word came out like a confession. “I’m falling for him.”

I watched a moth fight the gravity of the porch light above the back door. “Does he treat you good?”

“He does,” she said simply, and I heard the wonder in it, like she still didn’t trust the ground.

“He’s gruff and bossy and thinks he can fix everything with money or muscle, but when I say no, he stops.

When I say I’m scared, he listens. He makes me laugh when I don’t want to.

He brings me coffee how I like it—two sugars and one of those tiny creamer cups because he says ‘milk’ is vague.

” She huffed a laugh. “He remembers every detail. BJ never remembered anything unless it served him.”

The name moved between us like smoke again. There was a pause because I didn’t know what to say.

“Does that make me dumb?” she wondered. “Falling for the man I…chose as shield?”

“Maybe it just makes you alive,” I comforted her. “We didn’t get to be alive for a long time.”

She smiled at that—small, crooked one she gets when she’s anxious. “Maybe.”

Since we were sharing, and I always told her everything, it was time. “I have to tell you something.”

Lyric’s attention sharpened, warm and ready. “Yeah?”

I looked at my hands. The tiny white crescent scars near my knuckles were from dish racks, from drying too fast, from hurrying in kitchens where breaks were a myth and your boss’s nephew got to order everyone around.

Church kitchen dishes were my job back home.

These were the kinds of marks I understood.

The new marks were all inside left on my soul from a man I barely knew. “Last night I was with Thrasher.”

“With him,” she said, and I could hear how soft she made the words so I wouldn’t flinch. “Like with him with him?”

I nodded.

Her brow lifted, but she didn’t grin or squeal or tease me. She just waited, the way you wait outside the door of a room where a friend went to cry.

“It was my first time,” I said into the space between us.

Her lips parted, then pressed together. “Well, I would assume so. I know what happened in high school with Logan and you barely came out of that one. After him, you didn’t even date another boy.

You aren’t a whore so it would only make sense this was your first time.

” After a moment, she asked the only question that mattered. “Did you want it?”

“Yes.” The yes surprised me with how true it sounded in the air. “I did. In the moment I did. I still do when I think about, how it felt. But then after, when he realized—” My throat closed around the memory. “His face changed. His voice did too. He said some things.”

“What things?”

“That I was his now,” I shared. “He said no other man would touch me. He said I was claimed.”

Lyric’s mouth went flat for a second, like she was tasting the word. “Claimed.”

“I don’t know how to feel about it,” I admitted.

“Part of me felt safe, hearing him say that at the time anyway. Another part of me—” I dug my nails into my palms, not hard enough to hurt, just to feel.

“Another part of me wanted to run for the door and keep running. Giving a man power over me after Logan violated my body.” I shuttered just remembering the night.

While he didn’t penetrate me with his penis, he did other things to me that night, painful ones.

Lyric moved closer, thigh to thigh now. “I get that.”

“I liked the sex,” I blurted, as if I had to prove I wasn’t broken, as if liking it were a test I could fail.

“I liked how my body felt. Heck, I even liked the ride on his motorcycle before. Well, once I stopped thinking about falling off. I liked that he watched my face. I liked that he said it was good. I liked that he held me after and didn’t make me talk.

Mostly, I liked that he stopped to ask me for consent. ”

“Okay,” she said, nodding like we were taking inventory. “Liking is allowed.”

“But I don’t know that I fit in his world? He said we would do this for as long as he wanted. Well what if I fall in love like a fool and then he poof leaves me?” The word love felt too big in my mouth. “I don’t know that word anymore. Not the way other people use it. I don’t know how it fits.”

Lyric leaned her head back and looked up into the fan of leaves above us, some green, some browned at the edges.

“After BJ,” she said, “I learned sex and love aren’t the same animal.

Sometimes they share a collar; sometimes they run in opposite directions.

I wish I’d learned that when I was sixteen instead of almost twenty, but here we are. ”

I waited.