This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 318

Chapter 346 Play Gamca

Finished

There you are.

Nelson.

Ernest, still spread out across his chair like a man who’d made peace with gravity, caught the tail end of the exchange and tilted his head toward her. Your brother is a hitman too?”

“Yeah,” Maya said easily. “Life’s expensive. He dropped out early and started taking contract work to help keep things going at home. Is that a problem?”

“Rough break,” Ernest said, his tone landing somewhere between genuine sympathy and dry, unhurried amusement. “Poor kid.”

Maya didn’t bother responding to that.

“I’d like to meet those other brothers of yours sometime,” Chance said, unable to keep it to himself. “Two kids holding down the whole family. That’s something else.

“And they all seem furious about absolutely everything,” he added, “every single day, all the time. You’re adults. How much can there really be to be angry about on a daily basis?”

Lucy nodded in complete, wholehearted agreement.

Maya laughed it off and let the subject go without a word.

Nelson loaded into the lobby a moment later. “Still online at this hour, Maya?” he asked.

He wasn’t much of a gamer. The number of actual games on his phone could be counted on one hand. But when Maya’s invite came through, he logged on anyway.

“I’m out on a job,” Maya said into the mic. “It’s slow going. A couple of rounds would help.”

A job.

Nelson had long since made his peace with the things Maya said. He laughed and agreed without pressing further.

r When the match wrapped up, his voice came through quiet and even. “Good night, Maya,” he said, warm and perfectly courteous.

After Nelson left the party, Lucy leaned in with the bright, unconcealed energy of someone who had been sitting on a question. “Okay, which brother is that one?”

“Not a brother,” Maya said. “He’s a client.” She considered it for a moment and thought that was far too indifferent an answer, then added, “A friend too.”

Nelson was nice to her. He was always sending things her way without being asked.

Lucy pressed a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. “He fancies you,” she said.

Maya turned it over in her mind, genuinely unsure. “I honestly don’t know,” she said.

12:31 pm ppp.

Chapter 316 Play Gamea

She didn’t quite understand it.

Finished

By every reasonable account, her age was supposed to be when those feelings arrived in a person, vivid and all-consuming and supossible to ignore, but she’d never felt the pull of any of it herself.

Ernest, who had been horizontal in his chair for the entire evening, tilted his head toward them with the unhurried authority of someone who had firmly held opinions and intended to share them.

“Young people need to act their age,” he said. “Getting attached too early is a reliable way to miss the schools you actually want.”

Maya didn’t dignify that with a single word.

The days that followed were genuinely pleasant.

$

Spring had arrived somewhere above the reinforced walls and sealed corridors of the Imperial Order’s base, warm and slow-moving, the world outside pulling itself back into color and motion without anyone’s permission. None of that light ever reached inside.

Maya kept watching. Kept waiting for the moment this place finally split open at the seams, when chaos rolled in like a tide and gave her something real to work with.

The waiting stretched long and uneventful, and so she ordered baking supplies and put them to use.

Cream cake, fruit tart, and pudding, each one finished with precise cuts of strawberry and blueberry in vivid reds and deep blues, three perfect servings laid out with the kind of care that belonged in a proper bakery window.

She brought the first one to Lucy.

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