This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 392

The second the door was about to click shut, his hand shot through the gap.

No warning. He reached out and caught her wrist.

His hand was cold. His fingertips felt like a winter that had never thawed. He held on tight, all five fingers locked around her wrist, gripping with the force of someone trying to hold on to a person who might vanish on him.

He said. “Don’t go.”

Two words, and his voice came out rough.

Maya looked back at him, frozen in place. Alfred stood in front of her, his face pale, his expression giving away nothing.

But she’d known him for too long. His eyes were like a dark current sliding beneath ice, deep and almost desperate.

His hand was still wrapped around her wrist. That unnatural, chilled temperature was seeping through her skin.

His lashes lifted.

There were tears in his eyes, bright and clear.

“Please. Don’t go.”

Three words, and Maya forgot how to breathe for a second.

Something came back to her. Right before she’d died, he’d cried then too. So those really had been tears.

“Alfred,” she said, and her voice came out softer than she’d planned, with a softness she hadn’t heard from herself before. “What are you talking about?”

She was still playing the part. She was just playing it badly, the last note of the question slipping into something tender.

His dark curls fell forward and hid most of his face. All she could see was the line of his jaw and the downward sweep of his lashes. She couldn’t read him.

Then she remembered what the system had said. Sooner or later, they’re going to notice.

After a long moment, he looked at her. “You’ve died in front of me. So many times.”

Something in him broke open in that instant. Every piece of reason and logic was shattered at once. He kept seeing her dying, over and over in his memory. Same place, different night, same ending.

Alfred had only ever half understood emotions. No one had taught him what suffering was. He couldn’t grasp most of what other people felt, and he’d never understood why anyone would cry so hard over someone who’d died.

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Chapter 392 How Do 1Save You

7

Now Maya’s death was teaching him. It was the first time he’d ever encountered anything that desperate, that bleak. The scene of her dying kept looping in his head, and the weight of it was almost drowning him.

For a second, he couldn’t tell whether what he was looking at was real or just another afterimage in his

memory.

“Maya.”

The light in the room caught the tear tracks down his face. He looked at her without registering anything. tears sliding down his checks.

Alfred had always seemed grown–up to her, the kind of person nothing could rattle. But right now, he was exactly what he was, a sixteen–year–old boy terrified of losing someone, fragile and unmoored. He was falling apart.

“How am I supposed to save you?”

He nearly shouted it. He couldn’t hold any of it back. His eyes were bottomless with grief as he looked at her, as if he were begging her for an answer.

It was a heartbreaking look. The look of someone watching a person he couldn’t hold on to, someone standing right in front of him who still felt like she might disappear at any second.

He reached out and pulled her into his arms, holding on tight, like a lost kid who’d finally found someone. He kept choking out the same words over and over.

“How am I supposed to save you?”

In the beginning, Alfred hadn’t had any memories at all. Then one night, something had vaguely felt wrong. He didn’t know why he’d woken up in the middle of the night. He didn’t know why his feet had carried him to that abandoned construction site.

Then he’d seen her.

She was lying there alone. A run–down place, an empty site, the moon shining down on the small dark pool of blood beneath her.

He’d stood there as the wind blew through, carrying the dusty smell of the site into his collar. Looking at that, his brilliant mind, the thing he’d always relied on, went completely blank.

He’d lifted his fingers to his cheek. Tears were running down his face.

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