Page 212 of Joker

Not fully done. Not until the garage. Not until every promise is paid.

But enough that he will never reach for them again.

Raven’s face crumples just slightly before she presses into me harder.

Lexi sighs in her sleep and scoots closer until she’s half tangled across both of us, and I stand there in the center of my room with the two of them in my arms and the taste of blood still in my mouth and realize something so clean and simple it almost hurts.

I don’t just want them alive. I want them mine.

Permanently. Not in the broken, twisted way Cal meant ownership. Not control. Not possession.

I want mornings and bedtime and little pink shoes by the door. I want Lexi asleep in the next room and Raven in my bed and a life so solid no man like him ever gets to cast a shadow across it again. I want permanence. Walls. A home. Their names folded into mine in every way that matters.

I lower my mouth to Raven’s forehead. Then to Lexi’s hair.

And in the quiet of that room, with danger still breathing in the garage and violence still waiting for me outside that door, one truth settles all the way through me.

He came for the woman and child I love.

He was dumb enough to touch what’s mine.

And now that I know what having them in my arms feels like after nearly losing it, there is no version of this life where I ever let them go.

The first thing I notice is the laughter.

Not because it’s loud. Though it is. Not because it’s unusual. It isn’t anymore.

I notice it because it doesn’t make my shoulders lock.

It doesn’t send my body searching for the nearest exit. It doesn’t make me count doors, windows, shadows, angles, voices. It doesn’t make me wonder what’s coming next or how long I have before something sharp and terrible cuts through the middle of whatever fragile good thing I’m standing in.

It’s just laughter.

Warm and full and woven all through the clubhouse yard like smoke from the grills and the low hum of music drifting out from the open bay doors.

Kids are running in every direction with the kind of wild, careless energy only children and men who think they’re still children can bring to a summer evening. Somebody has a football out near the far edge of the property. Somebody else is already yelling because a beer got knocked over and apparently that counts as a personal attack. The women are gathered in loose clusters near the picnic tables and lawn chairs, plates balanced on knees, drinks in hand, talking over each other andlaughing like this is the most natural way in the world to spend a Sunday.

Maybe it is. Maybe that’s the whole point.

It’s late enough in the day that the sun has softened, pouring everything in gold instead of heat, and the clubhouse grounds look less like a place built for protection and more like what they really are now.

A home.

I stand near the back porch steps with a cup of lemonade in one hand and let myself take it in for a second.

Really take it in.

The grill smoking under Logan’s supervision while Mac tells him he’s doing it wrong even though he’s clearly not. Cain leaning against one of the posts with a beer in hand while Emma talks to Kya and Allison, Jason weaving unsteadily around his father’s boots with all the focus of a tiny, determined menace. Carter has Casey laughing hard enough she nearly chokes on her own juice box, which means Brooke is shaking her head and smiling even while she pretends to be scandalized by whatever nonsense he just said. Shaina is half sprawled across one of the chairs with Shadow standing behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder like he doesn’t even realize he’s touching her and would absolutely kill somebody for pointing it out.

And Lexi…my heart squeezes before I can stop it.

Lexi is on Joker’s shoulders.

She’s got both hands in his hair, pink sandals kicking against his chest while she points dramatically toward the football like she’s calling plays for a team she has absolutely nobusiness running. Joker has one hand wrapped around each of her little ankles, face tilted up in that long-suffering, deadpan expression he always wears when she’s bossing him around like she was born for it.

“You’re steering wrong,” she tells him, loud enough for half the yard to hear.

Joker doesn’t even blink. “That sounds made up.”