Page 181 of Joker

He grins, which is a mistake, but not one I’ve got the patience to correct right now.

Shadow pushes off his bike and jerks his chin toward the back of the garage. “Come on.”

I almost tell him no. Then decide I’m outnumbered and not in the mood to fight the two men most likely to stand there until sunrise waiting me out.

So I follow them.

The back of the garage is cooler than the yard, oil and steel and old concrete giving the place that familiar smell I’veassociated with work and blood and brotherhood for most of my adult life. There’s a small workbench along one wall, spare parts in labeled bins, a fan in the corner that’s making a whole lot of noise and not nearly enough difference.

Shadow leans against the workbench. Blaze drops onto an overturned crate. I stay standing because I don’t trust myself to settle.

For a minute, nobody says anything.

Then Shadow cuts straight through the middle of it. “You love her.”

There’s no dramatic pause after that. No build. No softening. Just the truth thrown into the room like a wrench.

I look at him.

Then Blaze.

Blaze lifts both hands. “I was going to go with ‘obsessed in a concerningly competent way,’ but yeah, what he said.”

I should deny it. Should laugh. Threaten. Turn it into a joke. Pick a fight. Do literally anything other than stand there in silence with the answer written all over my face. Instead, I do the thing that apparently I’m doing a lot lately.

I tell the truth. “Yeah,” I say.

Blaze blinks. Actually fucking blinks.

Shadow, to his credit, only nods once like he already knew and was just waiting for me to catch up to what had been obvious to everybody else for a while now. “That’s your woman,” he says quietly.

And there it is. Not a question. Not a guess. Not teasing.

A fact.

Something in me settles when he says it. Not because it’s new. Because it isn’t. Because he’s just putting words to something that’s already been living under my skin long enough to leave marks.

I look toward the doorway, toward the clubhouse beyond it, toward the place where Raven is probably trying to hold herself together after cutting me and being cut right back by the aftermath of it.

Then I say the only thing that feels true enough to stand on. “Then I better make sure she survives long enough to hate me later.”

The words land hard.

Blaze’s expression shifts first, some of the bullshit dropping away long enough to reveal the man underneath it.

Shadow’s face doesn’t change at all. That somehow says more.

“Pretty sure she already loves you too much for that,” Blaze says after a second.

I look at him.

He shrugs. “What? She does. She just hasn’t caught up to how fucked she is.”

That almost pulls a laugh out of me.

Shadow pushes off the bench and crosses his arms. “You can’t solve what happened in the kitchen with more security.”

“I know.”