Page 202 of Joker

There’s something in his voice that almost undoes me right there. Not softness exactly. Just a rough kind of care that still manages to feel like safety even when the whole rest of him looks like violence in boots.

“You need to listen to me before you leave.” The words come out steadier than I feel.

His eyes narrow slightly. Not because he’s angry. Because he knows me well enough now to hear the difference between panic and certainty.

And this?

This is certainty.

He lets the door shut behind him and crosses the room slowly, like he’s trying not to wake Lexi even though she could probably sleep through a hurricane at this point.

When he gets close, he stops in front of me, close enough that I can smell leather and soap and whatever cold, electric thing lives under his skin when he’s keyed up like this. “You know something?” he asks.

I shake my head once. “No. But I know him.”

That lands. Hard.

His jaw shifts.

“I know how he thinks,” I continue quietly, glancing once at Lexi before I look back at him. “And if you’re going after him, you need more than a location and a reason.”

His expression doesn’t change much. That’s how I know he’s listening. Really listening. “Talk,” he says.

I take a breath. Then another. Because once I start this, I’m not just giving them information. I’m opening up a map of the worst years of my life and handing it to the man I love like a weapon.

And somehow that feels both terrifying and right.

“He likes borrowed spaces,” I say. “Places that aren’t directly his. Not because he’s smart enough to think long-term, but because he likes the feeling of being untouchable. Like he’s too connected to ever really get caught.”

Joker says nothing.

I keep going. “He won’t stay somewhere official if he thinks there’s heat on him. Not a house with his name on it, not a place he can be traced to too easily. He’ll use favors. Family friends. Men who owe his father something. He likes being in places where other people will get burned first if things go wrong.”

That gets a visible reaction. Not much. Just enough tightening in his shoulders to tell me he’s filing it away.

“He likes control,” I say. “Physical control, obviously, but not just that. Environmental control. He likes to know where the exits are. He likes one clean way out and one backup plan he thinks nobody else has noticed.”

Joker’s gaze sharpens. “You saying he’ll run?”

“I’m saying he’ll run if he thinks he has to. But only after he’s convinced himself he’s already won.”

That one lands even harder. Because that’s the part of Cal nobody ever really understands until they’ve lived with him long enough to know where his ego ends and his paranoia begins.

“He doesn’t just want to take things,” I say more quietly now. “He wants to make people feel small while he does it. He wants them afraid before he touches them. He wants them doubting themselves before he even walks into the room.”

My throat tightens around the words.

Joker notices. He crouches in front of me without warning, big body lowering until he’s eye level with me, hands settling on my knees like he’s grounding me through contact while still giving me room to stop if I need to.

I don’t. Not now.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says.

And there it is.

The difference. The whole difference between him and everything I ran from. He’s not trying to silence me. He’s making sure I know I still have a choice.

That nearly wrecks me all over again. “Yes,” I whisper. “I do.”