Page 139 of Joker

No pressure. No demand. Just there.

I stay like that until the shaking leaves my hands. Until my breathing evens out. Until the room feels like something I can exist inside again without coming apart.

When I finally pull back enough to look at him, his eyes are already on mine.

Dark. Steady. Certain in a way that should probably scare me by now and somehow never does.

“You alright?” he asks quietly.

I let out a soft, uneven laugh. “No,” I say honestly. “But maybe I will be sometime soon.”

Something in his expression shifts. Barely.

Then he slides one hand up the back of my neck and holds me there for one breath, two, before saying the thing that settles deepest. “You don’t carry this shit by yourself anymore, angel.”

And this time, when I believe him it doesn’t feel reckless.

It feels like relief.

I don’t sleep much after Raven tells me everything.

Not because she leaves.

She doesn’t.

She falls asleep in my bed with one hand still half-curled into my shirt like some part of her doesn’t trust distance yet, and I lie there on my back staring at the ceiling while the weight of what she handed me settles in piece by piece.

Cal.

The badge. The family ties. The cameras. The bruises. The way she saidhe touched me like punishmentin that quiet, detached voice that told me she’s had to say worse things to herself just to survive them.

Every time I close my eyes, I see a version of him.

I build him in my head from scraps.

The kind of man who weaponizes calm. The kind who smiles in public and closes his fist in private. The kind who thinks a marriage license means ownership. The kind who looks at a woman and a child and sees leverage.

I know that kind of man. Not personally. But I know him anyway. Men like that are all built from the same rotten blueprint. And now I know exactly what he is. That should be enough to make me reckless.

Instead, it does something worse.

It makes me precise. Because rage is easy. Rage gets sloppy. Rage gets loud. Rage leaves openings.

And after everything Raven told me tonight, I don’t get to be sloppy.

Not with her. Not with Lexi.

No.

Now I have to think like the kind of man who survives ugly things. Which means I have to think like the kind of man who hunts.

I don’t move for a long time.

Raven is warm against my side, asleep in the dark with her hair spread across my pillow and one knee pressed against my thigh like she got there by instinct. There’s a little crease between her brows even now, even sleeping, like some part of her still doesn’t know how to fully let go.

That one almost breaks me all over again. Because she told me.

She told me the worst of it. Not everything, maybe. There are probably still details she hasn’t been able to force into words yet. But she gave me enough. Enough that I know the shape of the hell she crawled out of. Enough that I know exactly what kind of man I’ll have to kill if he gets close enough to make me choose.