This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 316

Chapter 314 Her Little Friends

Pished

“Yeah, I’ve always kicked doors open.” Maya said, completely at ease with herself. “Silent Archive is all about the people. Employees come first.”

Ned had never once said a word about it, no matter how many times she walked through his door unannounced.

A short, quiet breath escaped Ernest’s throat, somewhere between contempt and reluctant amusement.

“People first,” he repeated, slow and deliberate. “Silent Archive.” A flat, brief laugh left him before he pulled

it back.

Maya held her ground without a flicker of doubt. “Yeah. At the very least, we never sell out our clients’ personal information. Your organization will take any deal that walks through the door, won’t they?

“Someone hires you for intel today, and tomorrow you’ve already turned around and sold that same client’s information to the highest bidder.”

The Imperial Order truly was in a class of its own when it came to operating without a conscience.

Smuggling, underground transactions, and every kind of deal that couldn’t survive exposure to daylight were their forte, and their monthly revenue put most contract organizations to shame.

“Alright, you’re not wrong,” Ernest said, his expression cooling into something flat and perfectly still, his lashes casting a thin shadow beneath his eyes. “That’s exactly how this organization built itself up. A lot of people have had their lives completely shattered because of what we do.”

Silent Archive, at the end of the day, was a straightforward kill-for-hire outfit, nothing more and nothing less.

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12.31 pm PPP

Finished

Chapter 315 Different Ones

Silent Archive ran like a hierarchy ladder, top to bottom, management to contractors to technical staff, everyone paid to do a job and nothing more.

Transactions were clean, lines were cleas and nobody stepped outside their lane.

The Imperial Order was a genuine criminal eingire, the kind that had spent years carving enemies out of every faction it ever touched, picking fights on both sides of the law with equal and tireless enthusiasm.

Both sides, as it happened, had been thoroughly and methodically antagonized under Ernest’s quiet guidance over the years.

Something lived in his face when he said it. Not quite grief, but something with real weight behind it, something that resembled old and unspent fury.

Maya couldn’t quite place it.

Who is that anger aimed at? And why does Ernest talk about the Imperial Order the way someone talks about a wound they’ve been carrying for years?

Is this just the kind of person the protagonist’s group draw in? The quietly furious, world-weary type?

“So an organization like the Imperial Order,” Ernest said, his tone shifting without warning, his expression going flat and unreadable, “has probably run its course.”

Maya stared at him.

Run its course?

“Are you doing okay?” she asked. Something about the whole thing felt off, like a current running beneath the surface in the wrong direction.

Ernest didn’t answer.

He tossed his pen onto the desk, stretched his arms overhead in one long, slow motion, and let the silence fill the room.

“Stop asking questions, kid,” he said. “Out. Stop bothering me.”

Maya spent a full month inside the Imperial Order.

In that time, Lucy, Chance, and Maya, three people with equally severe and unapologetic gaming addictions, settled into a comfortable nightly rhythm.

They’d finish their respective work and immediately fall into ranked matches until the small hours swallowed the clock.

At some point, nobody could quite remember whose idea it was, but Ernest ended up in the lobby with

them.

12:31 pm PPP.

ferent onc

Finished

Maya could feel something different about him during those weeks.

Not the surface kind of different, but the kind that lived inside a person’s walls, a tension strung tight and vibrating low, invisible at a glance but absolutely present to anyone paying attention.

His plan was closing in. The days were counting down toward something irreversible, and the pressure had chased his sleep clean out of reach.

When the invitation to play came, he didn’t refuse. He dropped straight into the queue without a word. The only problem was that their competitive mode required five players, not four.

Maya didn’t think twice. She pulled Alfred in.

“Wait, is that your brother?” Lucy’s voice jumped half a pitch the moment Alfred’s username appeared in the lobby. Her eyes caught the light with unmistakable interest.

Maya sent Alfred the party invite without ceremony.

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