This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 204

Chapter 204 It Doesn’t Matter

Edric didn’t particularly care about any of it.

His parents held some concern for him, but not much.

His brothers shared his blood, but not his life.

That arrangement suited him just fine.

Family was always family. Blood was a bond that couldn’t be severed and didn’t need to be nurtured.

As for anything beyond blood? He could take it or leave it.

He didn’t need his parents‘ affection.

He didn’t need his brothers‘ closeness.

His life moved along a clear, stable track, and nothing ever strayed from it.

With no desire to keep fielding the barrage of messages from the older generation and his brothers, Edric had the two children packed up and send home first thing the next morning.

He didn’t show his face once during the whole thing.

He simply arranged the car and the people, and that was that. Efficient and impersonal, like closing out a completed task.

Life at home resumed exactly as it had been.

Wendy held Maya at arm’s length and turned her around, checking her over until she was fully satisfied

her daughter had returned from the Clarks with all her limbs still attached.

ond’s reaction was the mildest of all, as though the two of them had simply taken a regular trip, out n. He waited for his wife to finish her fussing, and then he asked, “How was your month at the <s? What did you make of the place?”

hat did I make of it?

f

Maya thought back over the entire month, Outside of the gaming, the one real thing she’d come away with

was…

“I know how to shoot now.”

Raymond paused.

“Sorry?”

“Shoof,” Maya said, and mimed pulling a trigger.

In her past life, when she’d been quietly researching her options, she’d briefly considered a firearm. She d known nothing about them at the time, not even the basics of how one worked.

10:55 am Pppp.

Chapter 204 Docon’t Matter

finished

So she’d asked someone online.

They’d sent her a video tutorial, walking her through it step by step, and that was how she’d discovered that guns had safety mechanisms you had to disengage before the trigger did anything.

“You should’ve stayed longer then,” Raymond said, with a note of genuine regret, then shifted into a more serious register. “Maya, in regular society, if you start firing a weapon, your neighbors will call the police and you will get arrested.”

Firearms were, for ordinary people, a genuinely sensitive subject.

If she wanted to live a normal, unbothered life, she’d need to know how to live like a normal person.

There wasn’t much he and Wendy could offer on the topic of marksmanship, but the Clarks could teach her a great deal. Staying there longer would’ve made sense.

George waited for both parents to finish talking, then propped his chin in his hand and sighed with a trace. of disappointment.

“I actually thought Edric might take a bit more of an interest in you.”

Maya rested her chin on the table and looked at him sideways. “George, you seem really invested in Edric fixating on me.”

“Well, if he’s fixated on you, he stops fixating on me,” George said, completely unashamed. “I was honestly curious how he’d react. Turns out it was pretty underwhelming.”

He slumped forward onto the table with a deflated expression. “Boring.”

Maya grabbed the nearest mug off the table and knocked it against his skull three times in quick succession, each thud landing with a satisfying hollow resonance, the way a fist sounds against a solid wood door.

This insufferable, chaos–loving creature.

She had not gone easy on him.

“Maya, you can’t just do that to your brother!” he yelped.

The fallout from the school situation wasn’t going to settle for at least a year, maybe longer.

The school’s leadership was buried in lawsuits, crisis PR, and cleanup, and according to what Jenny had mentioned in passing, the parents were absolutely relentless. The compensation negotiations had collapsed, and several families had gone to the media. All the way through December, both Maya and Jenny had been sitting at home with nothing to do.

Her days were shaped by the training sessions her mother dragged her to. Her evenings were hers. She usually spent them talking to Lawrence.

10:55 am Pppp.

Chapter 20411–Doesn’t Matter

Maya gave him a rough account of everything that had happened with the school.

Lawrence listened from kis end of the line.

Finished

When he heard what Raymond had done, his grip on the phone tightened briefly. He thought to himself that Raymond might not be a good man by every measure, but he was clearly going to be a very good father.

“Did you get scared?” Lawrence asked, biting the back of his hand. The small sting of pain helped him settle his nerves.

Maya paused.

“Not really,” she said. She was used to things like this by now, and added, “Stop worrying about me. I’m the older one here.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify