Chapter 27 #2
I can still hear Cal’s voice if I let myself. The smooth, reasonable tone he used when he was explaining why I was the problem. Why my resistance hurt him. Why every punishment was really my fault for making him do it.
I hate that part the most. That for a long time, I believed him. “Lexi made it worse,” I say, then immediately correct myself. “No. That’s wrong. He made it worse. But after she was born, everything changed.”
Joker doesn’t speak. He’s still just standing there, eyes on me, arms loose at his sides, not moving a fucking inch.
“He loved her in public,” I whisper. “Or acted like it. Enough that if anyone had seen him with her outside the house, they’d think he was…” I laugh once without humor. “Good.”
The word tastes rotten.
“But at home she was leverage. She was pressure. If I pushed back, he’d remind me he could make me look unstable. That he could take her. That nobody would side with a woman who couldn’t keep herself together.”
This time when I look at Joker, he’s already watching me in that same awful, unwavering way. He says nothing.
I have no idea how he’s managing it. I’m half-convinced if our positions were reversed, I’d already be breaking things.
“He hit me,” I say finally.
There it is. The plainest version. The ugliest one because it requires the least interpretation.
“He backhanded me. Threw me into walls. Grabbed hard enough to bruise.” My voice stays strangely even. Detached. “Not every day. That would’ve been easier, in a way. Easier to name. Easier to run from sooner.”
Joker’s eyes close once. Just once. Like he’s locking something down behind them by force. Then he opens them again.
I keep going because I’ve come this far and stopping now would be worse than finishing.
“When I finally tried to leave, he caught me. He’d been watching through the cameras.
Watching me hide money. Watching me plan.
” The memory is so vivid I can taste the blood again.
“He told me if I wanted to leave, I’d do it in a casket. ”
The room feels colder suddenly. Or maybe that’s just me finally running out of whatever heat held this all together.
“He meant it,” I say. “That’s the part I need you to understand. He doesn’t bluff when it comes to me. If he finds us, he won’t drag me back and try to fix it. He’ll make an example out of me.”
There. Done.
The room goes quiet in a way I can feel in my teeth.
I wait for the fallout.
The judgment. The pity. The shift.
For Joker to look at me and see not a woman, but a complication. A mess. A liability with a child and a monster following too close behind.
I brace for distance because distance, at least, would make sense.
Instead, Joker goes still. Terrifyingly, completely still.
No movement. No pacing. No muttered curse. No explosion.
That is somehow worse. Because now I can feel exactly how much he is not saying.
The force of it fills the room anyway.
He doesn’t look shocked. He doesn’t look sorry for me. He looks like something in him just locked into place hard enough to crack bone.
When he finally speaks, his voice is lower than I’ve ever heard it. “Why didn’t your father know all of that?”
The question catches me off guard. Not because it’s cruel. Because it isn’t. It’s practical. Immediate. Angry in a direction that makes me feel sick and relieved all at once.
I swallow. “He knew some. Not all. Cal worked hard to keep me ashamed and quiet, and I…” I let out a breath. “I kept thinking if I could just get out, I wouldn’t have to tell anyone the worst of it.”
Joker nods once. He understands that too. “What about the cops?” he asks.
I almost laugh. It comes out brittle.
“He is a cop. His cousins are cops. His uncle used to be county sheriff. His family donates to campaigns. Hosts fundraisers. Knows judges by first name. Even if one of them wanted to help me, it would’ve been me walking into their world and asking them to believe I knew what kind of man one of their own really was. ”
His face doesn’t change. But I see it. That little tightening around the eyes. The set of his jaw going harder.
“Would’ve been my word against his,” I say. “And he’s good at being calm when people are watching.”
That one feels important too. Like it explains a thousand things without me needing to say more.
The room stays quiet after that. Not because I’m done. Because I’ve run out. Out of words. Out of skin. Out of places to put the shaking in my hands.
I force myself to stand anyway. I’ve told him now. Enough of it, anyway. Enough to ruin any version of me he might’ve been building in his head. Enough to make walking away from me the smart choice.
So I brace for it.
For him to put distance between us. To tell me he’ll still protect me, still protect Lexi, but this changes things.
Instead, he steps closer. One step.
Nothing sudden. Nothing that makes me feel cornered. Just enough to make it clear he’s choosing proximity after all of that. Not despite it.
After it.
His voice, when it comes, is like gravel dragged across steel. “You listen to me now.”
I don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t think I could if I tried.
He doesn’t touch me. Not yet. But every line of him is turned fully toward me now, and there’s something in his face I’ve never seen aimed at me before.
Not anger. Not exactly. Ownership, maybe. Certainty. Something old and violent and impossible to argue with.
“He doesn’t get you back.”
The words hit me hard enough that my eyes burn instantly.
Joker’s gaze doesn’t waver. “He doesn’t get another hand on you. He doesn’t get another hand on Lexi.” Each sentence lands like a promise and a threat at the same time. “He doesn’t get to scare you for the rest of your life because he’s too rotten to die when he should’ve.”
My throat tightens painfully.
He steps closer again. Not enough to touch. Enough that I can feel the heat of him now.
“You’re mine,” he says, and there’s nothing soft in it. Nothing careless either. It is not possession in the way Cal ever meant it. It’s something darker and cleaner and infinitely more dangerous. “That kid’s my girl.”
The words knock the breath out of me.
Not because they scare me. Because they don’t. Because for the first time in a very long time, somebody says something that absolute about me and it doesn’t sound like a cage.
It sounds like a wall. A promise. A line no one gets to cross and live.
Joker’s jaw flexes once, hard. “No one is touching either of you again.”
And God help me, I believe him.
Not because it’s rational. Not because I have any proof he can outrun every thread Cal can pull.
I believe him because of the way he says it. Because he isn’t trying to comfort me.
He’s informing the world.
I stare at him, stunned and wrecked and more vulnerable than I know what to do with.
He looks back at me like nothing in this room is unresolved now except the exact shape of the violence he’s going to visit on the man I just described.
I should say something. I don’t know what. Thank you feels too small. So I stand there, breathing too hard, feeling the entire axis of my world shift another notch off center.
Joker’s eyes search my face once, taking something from it.
Then his expression turns colder. Quieter. Deadlier.
And when he speaks, it’s only one sentence. Simple. Final. “He should’ve died before you ever had to run.”
The words settle into my bones like truth. And for the first time since Cal’s face appeared on the other side of that front door and I realized there was no safe version of my life left to salvage, I think something terrifying.
Not that Joker could kill for me. Not that he would. That if it came to it, he would not hesitate.
And somehow, standing in his room, with my pulse still unsteady and my whole life laid bare between us, that doesn’t make me want to run.
It makes me feel safe.
Joker doesn’t say anything right away after that. He just stands there in front of me, broad and still and terrifying in the quietest possible way, like the room itself has shifted around him and decided to settle into something sharper.
I’m still trying to breathe around the weight of everything I just said. Around the fact that I said it at all. Around the even more destabilizing fact that he didn’t look at me differently afterward. If anything, he looks at me more steadily now.
Like he’s got the shape of the threat in his hands and he’s already figuring out where to break it. That should scare me. Instead, it makes my knees feel weak in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
Joker’s jaw flexes once before he finally speaks. “How’d you get out?”
The question is quiet. Not casual. Not gentle either. Just direct. Practical.
Like now that he knows what Cal is, he wants the route mapped. Wants the weak points. Wants the exact line between where I was and where I am now so he can understand every place I could’ve been lost between them.
I look down at my hands. For a second I just stare at them, at the way my fingers are laced too tightly together in my lap, at the faint tremor I can’t quite stop.
Then I make myself answer. “I got lucky.”
Joker doesn’t say anything. I can feel the shape of his disagreement from across the room anyway.
So I try again. “I got desperate enough to do something stupid and lucky enough that it worked.”
That seems to satisfy him enough to let me keep going.
I take a breath and look up. “I was at the grocery store with Lexi.”
The memory comes back sharp and immediate.
Too fluorescent. Too bright. The stale air-conditioning. Lexi in the cart seat with Bunny tucked under her chin. My heart pounding so hard I could barely hear over it because Cal had been worse than usual for days and I hadn’t known how much longer I could keep pretending I could survive it.
“I saw Morgan.”
Joker’s brow furrows slightly. “Morgan?”
“One of the old ladies from Louisiana,” I explain. “She was there with her granddaughter. I hadn’t seen her in…” I shake my head. “I don’t even know. A long time.”
I can still remember the exact moment she looked up and recognized me.
The pause.