This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 312

Chapter 812 Her Request

Finished

Ernest drew in a long slow breath, cycling through it twice, then arranged his face into something approaching a pleasant expression. He leaned sideways against the doorframe and crossed both arms over his chest. “I can send you off right now,” he said, his voice carrying a particular brand of patient sweetness. “You want to leave, kid?”

“I’m not leaving.” Maya said.

Ernest accepted his fate without further resistance.

He’d barely slept in days, caught up in shuttling messages back and forth to the outside world and working out how to keep information from leaking through the cracks inside the organization.

He’d managed a short stretch of rest by some miracle, and this child had ended it. He splashed some water on his face, resigned himself to the universe’s sense of humor, and took her to get her hair colored.

The trip out followed the same procedure as before, eyes covered the entire way.

Maya quietly memorized the route in both directions and noticed, without making it obvious, that the path this time was different from the last.

Multiple exits, then. More than one way in and out of this place.

She kept turning over the question of what to do about Ernest as they walked.

The system had been explicit: he wasn’t going to die anytime soon, and his role in the story was that of a mentor figure to the protagonist’s group, the kind of person who got pulled in whenever something needed solving, a reliable source of accurate intelligence on the enemy’s movements.

He was useful to the point of being indispensable to the story, which meant he was a trap lying in wait for anyone who was the protagonist’s enemy.

And he was completely off-limits.

He was a genuinely complicated problem.

Maybe there is a way to bring him over to my side instead?

From what she’d observed so far, Ernest had a real moral compass.

He had limits he didn’t cross and a basic standard of decency he actually held himself to.

She’d spent two days doing everything she could to wear him down and push his patience, and he’d stil treated her, a teenage assassin, with a kind of considered tolerance that she hadn’t expected.

Recruiting him probably wasn’t as difficult as it looked, if she found the right moment.

She just needed to wait for that moment.

12:31 pm PPP.

Chapter 21 Her femurent

Finished

The salon visit produced results Maya selected a vivid forest green, and when the stylist was done, she looked exactly like a bright, cheerful mushroom that had blootaed overnight.

Maya was delighted. She rotated in front of the mirror for a long, consented stretch, tilting her head from one angle to another with complete satisfaction.

Ernest looked at her hair in silence and let out a slow, quiet breath through his nose. He couldn’t honestly call it ugly.

It was actually kind of striking.

“Maya,” he said, and for once there was no edge to it, just a genuine, worn-down tiredness that had settled into his voice like something permanent. “Cut me a break. I’ll cut you one too. Stop following me around. I’m busy

“You: Busy?” Maya asked. “Chance said you basically float around the organization doing nothing. Are you really busier than your own teacher?”

Ernest looked at her with an expression that could have meant anything.

He still hadn’t worked out whether Maya was probing him on purpose with calculated precision, or whether she simply operated without an internal filter.

Based on everything he’d observed of her over the past few days, the second option seemed considerably more likely.

“Maya,” he said, and reached over to press her fluffy green curls back down flat with one hand, his brown eyes curving at the corners with something quiet in them. “I’ve always had an unusually high tolerance for you.”

That was the plain truth.

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