This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 405

This Time, I’ll Be the Villain’s Favorite Daughter

Chapter 405 Speechless

Every word left Edric at once.

Finished

Whether he was small or grown, he’d never had a single answer for someone whose mind worked the way Maya’s did.

“Are you Maya?” he asked.

Still tucked in her arms, the boy tipped his head back and turned her name over in his memory. His grip around her neck tightened almost without him realizing it. His voice dropped low. “I thought you were dead,” he said.

The dead were meant to be forgotten.

He’d known that much since he was very small.

Besides… why had she suddenly gone from being his peer to this older version of herself standing before him now?

Even for someone with Edric’s remarkable ability to take almost anything in stride, this was genuinely hard to make sense of.

Maya set him down. The shopping district shimmered alive around them, warm and buzzing with light and noise. The gunmen trailing them from the shadows watched for any sign of danger and found none. When they spotted their young charge looking perfectly at ease, the entire group fell back without a sound and kept their distance.

“Edric, I am seriously disappointed in you,” Maya said. He was wearing that stiff little expression of his, and she decided on the spot that she was going to do something about it.

She stopped, bent down, and got right in his face. She pinched his pointed little chin and made her announcement. “You’re not my little sidekick anymore,” she said.

“Why not?” Edric asked.

The words slipped out before he could catch them, and there was a wariness underneath his tone that he hadn’t even noticed in himself. “You got yourself another hound?”

“Yep,” Maya said.

She had Ernest now. Ernest was incredibly useful.

Edric’s cheeks puffed up completely against his will, round and indignant as a chipmunk’s. Every ounce of his displeasure was written plain across his face.

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Chapter 405 Speechless

In all the time they’d spent together that day, this was the very first genuinely childlike expression Maya had ever seen on him.

Finished

“If you’ve already got another hound, then why are you showing up in front of me?” he asked. “Why did you come back at all?”

Edric’s grip on his composure slipped, just a little.

He still remembered her when she was tiny, making all those grand declarations about being his boss.

And then she’d gone and grown up and found herself a whole new sidekick.

The telltale crack in his voice nearly made Maya burst out laughing.

She poked him gently between the eyes. “Save those questions for when you’re older,” she said. “You finally got out for once. Are you seriously going to waste it on stuff like that?”

The boy bit the corner of his lip.

“Then what do you want to talk about?” he asked.

Those calm, clipped little words gave Maya a sudden, vivid flash of what Edric would look like all grown up.

She couldn’t hold back.

Her fist came down squarely on top of his head.

“Edric, you are not allowed to use that stuffy grown-up voice with me,” she said. “I’m the adult here now!”

The hit actually stung. He tucked his neck down into his shoulders. When he looked up and caught that dead-serious expression on her face, a laugh broke loose from him, warm and soft.

His eyes curved into gentle crescents and stayed that way, lingering longer than they should have. “Maya,” he said, “why haven’t you changed even a little? You’re still like the same Maya when you were little.”

He tilted his head, something quietly curious running through his

gaze.

All these years, and she’s only gotten taller. Has her brain not grown with the rest of her?

Maya’s thoughts ground completely to a halt.

The instant she caught the sly mockery buried in those words, she nearly screamed.

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sharp little thistle that bites back?

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Nine,” he said.

“It’s only been a year since you were eight and in training.” Maya put her hands on his shoulders. “How did you end up like this?”

Edric caught the hem of her sleeve and pressed himself against her side.

“Isn’t it a good thing that I don’t cry anymore?” he asked. “Can you wait until I’m older? I’ll be very useful by then. Crying never gets you anything, and I’m going to be the best card the family’s ever had to play.”

The boy looked up. The emotion in his eyes burned with a cold, merciless clarity that belonged on someone decades older.

“But comparing yourself to a card is so weird,” Maya said. Something about that look unsettled her deep in her chest. She reached out and ruffled that cold expression right off his face.

“Stop pretending to be all grown-up with me.”

“Was I?” Edric blinked. Her sudden touch scattered every last trace of that mood.

He went quiet, a little sullen. “I thought that was perfectly normal reasoning,” he muttered.

“Normal reasoning?” Maya held her ground. “Kids are supposed to act like kids. That is normal reasoning. You’re not even a little bit cute anymore.”

“Cute?” A small, quiet smile touched the corner of his mouth. He reached out and caught her hand, holding it firm, his voice dropping soft. “I was just pathetic back then, wasn’t I? Do you really need me to cry for you again, Maya?”

Maya looked at the boy before her. His emotions had clearly drawn themselves back behind their walls. She let the thought go.

She didn’t want to just stand on the street catching up.

She caught Edric by the wrist and pulled him into a nearby restaurant.

The lighting inside was warm and amber, and the air drifted rich with the smell of fried food and butter.

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