This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 313

Chapter 312fter Request

At least lic knew exactly what he was getting.

“Also,” he added. “your hair actually looks terrible. You look like a piece of broccoli.

Fished

He reached out and ruffled her mushroom-cloud curls with zero remorse, a faint thread of amusement running through the gesture.

“Excuse me?” Maya grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled, slow and deliberate, each word landing with full weight. “You just messed up my hair.”

Her grip was not gentle.

Ernest’s expression pulled sideways in a way that had everything to do with pain.

The soft, slightly androgynous lines of his face went cold and sharp. “You absolute menace!” he said. “Where are your manners?”

“Touch my hair again and I will flatten you,” Maya told him.

Ernest went quiet for a moment.

He hadn’t yet arrived at a precise assessment of her combat capability, but she came out of the Silent Archive, and he was under absolutely no illusions about his own odds in that particular matchup.

He weighed his options for approximately half a second.

“Could you please let go?” he said, choosing survival. “I’m genuinely asking you nicely. Are you like this at home too? Did nobody raise you?”

This was completely unacceptable behavior.

Maya had, in fact, grabbed the hair of nearly every male member of her household at some point over the

years.

She’d been doing it since she was small enough that it had just become habit.

“Sorry,” she said, and she meant it. She released him and added, with complete sincerity, “But you also shouldn’t touch people’s heads without asking.”

r

She didn’t let people she wasn’t close to touch her head. That was a firm rule.

Ernest pressed his fingers against his scalp and rubbed at the sore spot, pulling in a slow, measured breath.

“Fair enough,” he said. “My bad. Think you can behave yourself now?”

“Sure,” Maya agreed.

Ernest did not believe her for even a fraction of a second.

The genuinely artless ones were always the most dangerous.

She’d meant the apology, and she’d absolutely do it again the next time.

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Chapter 370-Mer Request

Finished

“Lers head back. Broccoli,” he said, turning toward the door and sliding both hands into his pockets. His whole silhouette as he walked away had the loose, unhurried quality of someone who had made prace with being entirely at the mercy of the wind.

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This Tipe, #fde the villain’s Favorite Der

Chapter 313 Broccoli

Maya stared at the space where the conversation had been, completely at a loss.

Fuished

She made her way back to her borrowed room with her freshly colored hair and called her brother on video the moment she sat down.

Edric was in the middle of a conversation with his assistant when the call came in. He picked it up looking away from what he was doing.

Then he looked at the screen.

without

A vivid green mushroom stared back at him. She looked like a patch of spring lawn that had developed a personality and opinions about it.

“What do you think, Edric? Pretty great, huh?” Maya gave one of her short, freshly curled green spirals a light tug.

Whatever smile had been on Edric’s face faded out quietly and completely.

He didn’t say anything right away. He laced his fingers together and let his thumbs move slowly over his

fixed on the screen. knuckles, his eyes

Three full seconds passed before he spoke, and when he did, his voice had the faraway quality of a man narrating a dream he wasn’t sure he was having.

“Maya,” he murmured softly, almost to himself, “your hairstyle’s making my heart beat faster.”

His voice stayed low and unhurried, a man conducting an honest personal inquiry. “Is this what they mean by falling in love?”

Maya found no immediate response to that.

The assistant glanced sideways at the screen, took in the green mushroom of a head, then looked at Edric’s face. That normally composed expression had gone perfectly blank, and something underneath it was pulling steadily downward.

That is not falling in love. That is a man approaching the outer limits of his endurance.

Edric kept his eyes on his sister without blinking.

It’s awful.

He looked again, making a sincere effort to reason himself into a different conclusion.

Fine, it’s kind of cute.

He looked once more. No, still awful.

He tried again. Fine, it’s kind of cute.

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Finished

He ran this loop somewhere between seven and eight times inside his own head, and after all of that, the honest answer won.

“It’s awful,” he said, gently and with complete sincerity

He genuinely could not understand the calor

Forest green.

Forest green, of all the options available to her.

How, out of every swatch on that palette, did she locate and select the single most perplexing choice?

Maya never quite understood why older people made such a big deal about hair color.

Her grandfather treated the whole subject like a personal affront, as though she were proposing to dye the Clark family’s reputation rather than her own head.

“You’re awful,” Maya said, unbothered, giving her green curls another small, cheerful shake. She looked exactly like a bright little mushroom swaying in the wind. “Green is energetic. It pops.”

Edric was, by nature, a calm person.

It was not in the way that suggested an absence of feeling or the way some people were simply flat, but in the way of a man who had always been very good at managing himself.

Before Maya entered his life, he had been a composed, measured, genuinely successful human being. Right now he was teetering on the edge of something he didn’t have a word for.

“Maya,” he said, and used her full name, which meant something. “Do you genuinely think that color looks good on you?”

“Obviously,” Maya said, still swaying her head without a trace of doubt. “You’re basically ancient, Edric. You wouldn’t understand what young people think looks good.”

Edric, who was twenty-six years old, sat in silence for a considerable stretch of time.

When he finally spoke again, his voice had gone soft and even, the way one speaks to a small child who doesn’t know any better. “When you’ve had enough of being out there,” he said, “come home. Okay?”

“Got it, Edric. Talk later!” Maya said, and hung up.

Edric stayed on the call long enough to confirm that his sister was alive, functioning, and not in any immediate danger. Then he ended it.

His expression hadn’t shifted much, but the warmth behind his eyes had been replaced by something cool and deliberate, the particular patience of a person who has already made a decision and is simply waiting for the right moment to act on it.

He looked down and dialed a number.

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