Page 201 of Joker

Dom meets my eyes. “Forty miles out,” he says. “Old property off a service road. Minimal neighbors. Limited access points.”

Exactly what we were hoping for. Exactly what we need.

I glance at Raven.

She’s watching me. Not afraid of me. Not pulling back. Just…there. With me. She nods once.

That’s all it takes.

I look back at Dom. “Lock it in,” I say.

Because now?

Now we stop reacting.

Now we stop waiting.

Now we end it.

The clubhouse feels different when men are preparing for violence.

Not louder.

If anything, it gets quieter.

That’s the first thing I notice as the afternoon drags toward evening and the whole building seems to settle into something sharper than tension.

More deliberate. More dangerous. The usual life of the place is still there if you listen for it.

Kids laughing somewhere down the hall. A television on low in the common room. The smell of coffee and grease and somebody cooking enough food to feed half a county. But under all of that is something else now.

A pulse. A current. Something in the air that says the men moving through these halls are no longer reacting to danger. They are heading toward it. And for the first time in a very long time, I’m not scared because I don’t know what’s happening.

I’m scared because I do.

Lexi is asleep in Joker’s bed with Bunny tucked under her arm and one little hand curled into the comforter like she’s trying to hold on to sleep itself.

She cried herself into exhaustion after the store. Not hard. Not hysterically. That almost would’ve been easier. It was worse in that small, shaky way little kids cry when they know something bad happened even if they don’t have the language to explain what exactly made the air feel wrong. She clung to me until her eyes got heavy.

Then when she woke up and saw Joker she clung to him until sleep finally dragged her under again.

And when he laid her down and covered her up, he stood there for a full minute just looking at her like he was memorizing the fact that she was still here. Still breathing. Still whole. Still his to protect.

That look is living inside my chest now, right alongside the image of Cal’s hand around my wrist and the sound of my own pulse crashing through my ears while Lexi cried into my neck.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed when Joker comes back in. He doesn’t slam the door. Doesn’t stomp. Doesn’t bring chaos in with him. He just fills the room. All broad shoulders and cut and tattooed arms and the kind of dark, terrible focus that makes it very clear he is no longer simply protecting us.

He’s hunting.

And if I don’t say something now, if I let him walk back out of this room without doing the one thing I still can, then I’m going to spend the rest of my life, however long or short that ends up being, knowing I let the man I love walk into war withone hand tied behind their backs because I was too afraid to speak.

“Travis.” He stops instantly.

That’s what that name does to him. What it does to us. It strips away the patch and the road name and all the edges he gives the world until for one second it’s just him.

Just mine.

He turns toward me, one hand still on the doorknob. “Yeah, angel?”