This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 210

Chapter 210 Cleaning Up

“Don’t wash it,” Alfred told her.

Maya agreed without hesitation. “Okay.”

With all the gifts opened, the floor had become a landscape of wrapping paper, ribbons, and empty b scattered in every direction.

The kids moved to clean it up. Well, some of them did.

Maya and Lawrence were the only ones who actually got down and started gathering things.

The others wore the expressions of people who had somewhere else to be mentally.

Wendy settled the matter with a swift kick distributed fairly among the offenders.

With more hands eventually pitching in, the floor was cleared again before long.

Rayinond placed the cake squarely in the center of the dining table.

“Lights off, lights off. I’m lighting the candles.”

The room went dark all at once.

Only the two candle flames remained, casting a warm, trembling amber glow that moved and shifted across every face in the room.

“Make a wish, my darlings.”

Maya didn’t wish for anything.

Lawrence closed his eyes, his lashes trembling faintly, his expression completely earnest.

But she had a feeling he probably hadn’t wished for anything either.

They opened their eyes at the same moment and looked at each other.

Then they both leaned in and blew the candles out together.

The room dipped into darkness for just a heartbeat before George switched the lights back everything was bright again.

on and

“I’m starving,” he announced, drawing the words out into a long, suffering complaint, like someone who hadn’t eaten in three days.

Wendy didn’t dignify that with a response.

“Maya, Lawrence, come here. Look at the camera.”

Both of them were already leaning over the edge of the table, studying the cake with great interest. Ar the sound of her voice, they looked up at the same time on pure instinct.

Chapter 210 Cleaning Up

Wendy pressed the shutter button.

The moment was captured: two children with the same face, frozen side by side.

Her voice went up a full octave with delight. “Perfect!”

She enlarged the photo, then shrank it, then enlarged it again, cycling through the same sequence seve

times over.

She genuinely adored children.

As long as this particular child had no intention of taking Mayà away, Wendy was completely willing to open her arms to the boy who wore her daughter’s face.

Besides, Lawrence was genuinely easy to have around.

He was quiet and settled, not unlike Alfred in that way.

But his emotional intelligence was leaps and bounds beyond her son. He offered to help without being asked, and the things he said were sweet without being calculated.

She approved.

The cake was cut, the photos were taken, dinner was finished, and the adults retreated to handle the cleanup. The living room belonged to the kids.

Alfred settled on the far left of the sofa. Lawrence took the far right. Neither of them spoke.

Maya sat squarely in the middle, glancing left, then right, then left again. The air between them was a little thick.

This won’t do at all, she thought.

It was their shared birthday. She refused to let the evening fizzle out in awkward silence.

She proposed a game.

No relationship was too strained to survive a good round of gaming together.

People got competitive, got swept up in it, let the hunger to win crowd out everything else, and for a little while, whatever tensions existed in the real world simply stopped mattering.

That was exactly what happened.

Lawrence knew what he was doing.

Alfred didn’t even need to be said. He picked up anything quickly.

Maya, on the other hand, found herself dying repeatedly in spectacular fashion, taken out by a hail of gunfire every few minutes;

Chapter 210 Cleaning Up

She slapped a hand over her mouth and let out a pair of anguished sounds that the walls were barely t enough to contain.

Then she slumped and muttered a few pointed words under her breath.

Which the adults heard.

“Language, Maya,” Raymond said.

Maya turned around with an expression of such profound grief it could have been displayed at a memorial.

“I’m dead. Dad!

“I was ruthlessly cut down on the battlefield. You don’t even care. And now you won’t even let me express myself.”

Silence.

“Respect the fallen,” she added, her expression remaining utterly tragic.

Raymond considered this for a moment, then said, with complete detachment, “Fine. Express yourself.”

When he dealt with targets in his line of work, he occasionally extended the same courtesy, letting the soon–to–be departed say their last words before the end. After all, respect the fallen.

Toby had been standing in the doorway, already halfway out, when the sight of three children completely absorbed in their game made him pause mid–step.

He found all three of them lined up on the sofa with their heads together.

Alfred wore an expression of absolute focus. Lawrence had gone completely still, holding his breath. Maya was baring her teeth at the screen.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify