Page 35 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

MELODY

Six Months Later

T he cabin had become a real home. It took time.

At first it was just wood and nails, a square box tucked into the pines with a porch like a shrugged shoulder.

I’d walk the rooms and hear the echo of my own footsteps, the hollow of a life that wasn’t filled in yet.

Enzo had the house but treated it as a crash pad.

He’d kept it as a place to park his bike and let silence win.

When he put a key in my palm and said, “Welcome Home,” it felt like a dare and a promise stitched together.

Three months later, the cabin carried the shape of us.

His boots by the door, scuffed to hell and lined up like guards.

My sweater thrown over the back of the couch, a soft puddle of blue because I never remembered to fold it.

The scent of coffee ground and candles that smelled like clean cotton because he pretended not to care about candles and then lit them anyway.

A ceramic mug Elaina had painted at one of those little shops where you can be as creative or as terrible as you want; it sat beside the sink, a lopsided heart on the side.

She laughed when she gave it to him, telling him he’d never use it because it was too pretty, and he’d argued that nothing was too pretty for his coffee while he cleared his throat.

We had dinner dishes drying on a towel because the dishwasher made a noise he called “a dying cricket.” He said he’d fix it on a weekend and then took me on a ride instead.

Priorities. I didn’t mind. I liked the normal of plates clinking and suds up to my wrists.

I liked that we were the ones to do it together, talking about nothing and everything.

Tonight, he set two bowls on the coffee table—vanilla ice cream for me, a scoop like a snow mountain; something called rocky road for him that looked like he planned to beat it into submission—and dropped onto the couch.

The cushions dipped as he pulled me toward him.

He liked me tucked close. It was one of the many small ways he put his claim around me without saying a word.

I pretended to complain sometimes, to keep the game alive. Tonight I just leaned in.

“Movie or music?” he asked, remote in one hand, spoon in the other.

“Music,” I replied, because my head was too full for a plot. “Something low. The kind of guitar that sounds like it was played on a porch by someone with time.”

He snorted. “You and your poet brain.”

“You love my poet brain.”

“Yeah,” he retorted, simply, “I do.”

He put on a playlist he claimed was “random” but always seemed to know what I needed before I did.

A guitar threaded through the room, soft and patient.

He tipped my bowl toward me in warning, as if I was the one who’d spill, and then stretched an arm behind my shoulders, his fingertips idly tracing circles at the nape of my neck.

I ate three bites and then set the bowl down, not ready to swallow cold sweets when my mouth was full of a different kind of brave.

I’d spent all day carrying it around—through the laundry, through the grocery store, through the laugh with the cashier who said she liked my boots.

I’d tucked it in my pocket next to a folded paper towel and an object I could not stop touching, checking, confirming.

It was a secret and it was a surprise for sure.

I’d wanted the right moment. It had found me.

“Can I ask you something?” I wondered.

He refolded himself somehow without moving, attention snapping to me like a blade turned toward light.

I still wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of that focus when it wasn’t about danger.

He could do it in the kitchen over eggs and make me feel like I was the only thing in the world worth listening to.

“You can ask me anything,” he responded.

I rubbed my thumb along the seam of my jeans, feeling the stitch. “How do you feel about… about kids?”

The question hung there, a loop I couldn’t pull back through.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t laugh it off or slow-roll his answer. He went still, which with him is a thing you can feel. His hand slid to my jaw, thumb finding the line under my ear. The rough pad there was a sensation map I knew as well as my own skin.

“My kid is grown,” he explained and the defeat hit me hard.

“She’s got a spine I’m proud of, a life she’s building, and a mouth that would make me throw hands if it was from anyone else.

” He swallowed, and for a moment his gaze tipped somewhere behind me.

Then he came back. “But if you’re asking me how I feel about babies—” his mouth tilted, almost wicked, “—if you want babies, baby, I’ll give you babies. ”

My breath caught, not because I hadn’t expected a positive reaction but because he said it like a vow and a joke and a map. I honestly had no expectations, but this was going well.

“Before we do that,” he added, and his hand left my jaw to go into his pocket, casual as a man about to toss me a coin, “I want my ring on your finger and you to have my last name.”

He pulled something small and black from his pocket—one of those soft leather pouches he used for screws and coins—and shook a ring into his palm.

The lighting found it first. It gave off a glimmer like it had been waiting to be seen.

The band was thick with a stone sitting low and set like it meant to stay.

Not diamond either. Something deeper, smoky, the gray of a storm rolling off the ocean.

He’d chosen a stone that looked like the sky on a day when weather had opinions.

I didn’t realize I was shaking until he caught my left hand and steadied it with his. I got a breath just in time for him to slide the ring onto my finger. It fit like it had been measured by a man who’d counted my knuckles in the dark.

He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t drop to one knee. He didn’t ask.

He claimed.

My brain decided to sputter back to life on a technicality. I blinked up at him. “Umm… a proposal is a request. A question with an answer.”

He smirked, the corner of his mouth going crooked in that way that made things in me curl like paper in a flame.

“Told you, baby. My world, my rules. I don’t ask, I instruct.

” His fingers wrapped around my hand so that the ring pressed cool against his palm.

“You’re mine. And you want babies—I’m gonna give them to you—but you’re gonna be my wife regardless. ”

I was laughing and crying at the same time before I knew which one I’d chosen. I wiped at my face with my wrist and failed at both. “You can’t just?—”

“I can and I did.”

“What if I said no?”

“You didn’t. You wouldn’t. You won’t.”

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it because he was right and also because the thing in my pocket warmed like a brand. Fear and joy both came in hot. I took two breaths and tasted the future in both of them.

I turned his palm up and set the folded paper towel there, small as a secret and twice as heavy.

He looked down at it, then at me, eyes narrowing in that way that meant he’d already read what mattered in my face.

He unfolded the paper with his thick careful fingers, like he was unwrapping a fuse he intended to honor.

The little plastic stick lay in the middle, pink lines bright as candy. The kind of thing you use in a bathroom with the door locked and the window open to let the world in just a crack. My hands had trembled not because I feared it, but because sometimes even the wanted things arrive with thunder.

“You already gave me a baby,” I shared, and it came out soft, steady.

For a half-second he didn’t move. Then the stillness broke. He exhaled like he’d been holding a breath for years and set the test on the table as if it could bruise. His eyes shone and he blinked once, twice, the lashes wet. He did not pretend he wasn’t lit up. He wouldn’t give me the lie.

“Mine,” he said, like a man staking a claim. He reached for me, tugged me into his lap and caged me safely in with his arms. One hand slid to the small of my back, the other flattened over my stomach—gentle, tentative—and the tremor that went through him found the same note in me. “Ours.”

I nodded, tears fresh, laughter messy in the middle of it. “Ours.”

He pressed his mouth to my temple, then to the corner of my eye, then to my cheekbone, like he was giving the news to every part of my face. He rested his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. Softer. Lower. It had a new kind of gravity.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Listen to me. We do this how you need it, but I’m thinking.

Doctor first. Then Elaina. Then your mom.

I’ll make calls for the rest. The club will handle what the world tries to throw at us.

We’ll make this place ready. I’ll add on that room you said would be nice ‘someday’ because someday has moved up.

I’ll set cameras and motion lights and a gate on the road that only opens for family.

I’ll repaint the porch because it bugs me, and I’ll build a crib that’ll hold until a kid is three and thinks safety is a suggestion. I’ll do all of it twice.”

His hand still rested over my belly, warm and earnest.

I covered it with my own. “You don’t have to fix the world.”

“I know.” He cracked a smile. “Only our corner.” He sobered.

“I missed things with Elaina. Not because I wanted to. Because the life was messy and I was young and dumb. I used service as a way out and then I thought wearing the patch would be enough to satisfy everyone. I’m a man whose gonna do better. I’m gonna be there.”

“You are there,” I explained, and watched the way that landed. He took the compliment the way a man like him takes any soft thing—awkward at the edges, grateful at the center.

“What do you want?” he genuinely asked. “Right now. With the ring and the baby both on the table.”