Page 124 of Joker

Cain’s face goes flat.

Even Logan’s grin disappears.

Because every one of them knows exactly how bad a move that just was.

My voice drops low enough to scrape. “You wanna try that again?”

Grinder doesn’t back off. “Don’t push me, boy.”

Wrong fucking answer.

I plant both hands on Logan’s desk and lean in toward the phone like the distance between us means nothing at all. “Listen to me real goddamn carefully,” I say, each word clean and deliberate. “You can be pissed. You can hate it. You can threaten me all you want. But you do not ever talk about her like that again.”

The office goes dead quiet.

Every eye in the room is on me. I don’t care. “Not to me,” I continue, voice like gravel and violence. “Not to anybody. Not even you.”

There’s a rough exhale on the other end of the line.

I keep going before he can cut in. “She’s not some problem you handed off. She’s not baggage. She’s not a body. And she damn sure isn’t something for anybody to disrespect.”

Grinder’s breathing hard enough now that I can hear it through the speaker.

Good. Let him hear mine too. Because I mean every fucking word.

“This isn’t some fling,” I say. “It’s not a way to pass time while she’s here. It’s not me taking advantage of anything. I’m telling you plain, so there’s no confusion later—”

I straighten just enough to put every ounce of certainty I’ve got into the next words. “She’s mine.”

Nobody in the room moves. Nobody on the phone speaks.

I don’t stop. “That’s my old lady,” I say, voice hard and final. “And she’ll be treated like it. She’ll be respected, she’ll be taken care of, and she’ll be kept safe. The kid too. Both of them.”

The silence on the other end stretches long enough that I start wondering if Grinder hung up. Then he says, quieter now but no less dangerous, “That’s a hell of a thing to say about another chapter president’s daughter.”

“Then hear the rest of it,” I tell him. “I’m not asking.”

That one lands. I can feel it.

The difference between:

I want your blessingandI’m informing you of reality.

And because Grinder is who he is, he hears that difference exactly the way I mean it.

Logan, to his credit, stays the hell out of it.

Smart man.

Grinder lets out a slow breath through his nose. When he speaks again, some of the heat’s gone out of it. Not all. But enough. “She tell you everything?”

That question hits harder than I expect. Because no. She hasn’t. Not all of it.

I know enough to understand the shape of the monster she ran from. Enough to know Cal’s the kind of man whodeserves a slow death and a deep hole. Enough to know Raven’s carrying more than she’s said out loud.

But the full story?

No. And I’m not stupid enough to pretend otherwise.