Page 131 of Joker

His voice, when it comes, is like gravel dragged across steel. “You listen to me now.”

I don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t think I could if I tried.

He doesn’t touch me. Not yet. But every line of him is turned fully toward me now, and there’s something in his face I’ve never seen aimed at me before.

Not anger. Not exactly. Ownership, maybe. Certainty. Something old and violent and impossible to argue with.

“He doesn’t get you back.”

The words hit me hard enough that my eyes burn instantly.

Joker’s gaze doesn’t waver. “He doesn’t get another hand on you. He doesn’t get another hand on Lexi.” Each sentence lands like a promise and a threat at the same time. “He doesn’t get to scare you for the rest of your life because he’s too rotten to die when he should’ve.”

My throat tightens painfully.

He steps closer again. Not enough to touch. Enough that I can feel the heat of him now.

“You’re mine,” he says, and there’s nothing soft in it. Nothing careless either. It is not possession in the way Cal ever meant it. It’s something darker and cleaner and infinitely more dangerous. “That kid’s my girl.”

The words knock the breath out of me.

Not because they scare me. Because they don’t. Because for the first time in a very long time, somebody says something that absolute about me and it doesn’t sound like a cage.

It sounds like a wall. A promise. A line no one gets to cross and live.

Joker’s jaw flexes once, hard. “No one is touching either of you again.”

And God help me, I believe him.

Not because it’s rational. Not because I have any proof he can outrun every thread Cal can pull.

I believe him because of the way he says it. Because he isn’t trying to comfort me.

He’s informing the world.

I stare at him, stunned and wrecked and more vulnerable than I know what to do with.

He looks back at me like nothing in this room is unresolved now except the exact shape of the violence he’s going to visit on the man I just described.

I should say something. I don’t know what. Thank you feels too small. So I stand there, breathing too hard, feeling the entire axis of my world shift another notch off center.

Joker’s eyes search my face once, taking something from it.

Then his expression turns colder. Quieter. Deadlier.

And when he speaks, it’s only one sentence. Simple. Final. “He should’ve died before you ever had to run.”

The words settle into my bones like truth. And for the first time since Cal’s face appeared on the other side of that front door and I realized there was no safe version of my life left to salvage, I think something terrifying.

Not that Joker could kill for me. Not that he would. That if it came to it, he would not hesitate.

And somehow, standing in his room, with my pulse still unsteady and my whole life laid bare between us, that doesn’t make me want to run.

It makes me feel safe.

Joker doesn’t say anything right away after that. He just stands there in front of me, broad and still and terrifying in the quietest possible way, like the room itself has shifted around him and decided to settle into something sharper.

I’m still trying to breathe around the weight of everything I just said. Around the fact that I said it at all. Around the even more destabilizing fact that he didn’t look at me differently afterward. If anything, he looks at me more steadily now.