Villain’s Favorite 48

Chapter 48 Trying to Get Out 

What? Am I his security blanket now? He’s holding on as I might disappear. 

And where is a scrawny boy like him finding that kind of grip strength? 

Maya’s thoughts drifted without direction while she waited, and the pull of sleep started coming back for her. 

She was young enough that her body demanded rest relentlessly, and she hadn’t gotten a single second of it all day. 

The confrontation with Thomas, the horror of watching someone die at close range, all of it had stacked up until the exhaustion had become physical weight. 

But every time she started sliding under, Toby poked her awake with the focus of someone assigned a critical task. 

She was tired enough to contemplate retaliating seriously. 

He was injured, though. 

So she held herself back. 

She held herself back for about fifteen minutes before her body simply overruled her, and she dropped into unconsciousness. 

Toby could call her name as many times as he wanted. She was gone. 

He had nothing left to do but check her breathing every few minutes, his anxiety climbing each time quietly. 

The gunmen had finished their work and disappeared as though they’d never existed. 

The security team, which had contributed almost nothing to the entire situation, showed up afterward with weapons raised and found only empty corridors to intimidate. It took the better part of an hour to bring everything under control. 

By that point, Maya had been asleep long enough to have lost complete contact with the world outside. 

The bodyguard assigned to Toby knew his employer carried a weapon and held absolute authority within that estate. 

Nothing should’ve reached him. 

Which made what the bodyguard found when he broke the door down that much more disorienting. 

The boy sat at the edge of the guest bed, his lips completely pale, holding a disheveled girl against his chest with her hair covering her face entirely. 

When he heard the door, his eyes came up slowly and landed like ice. 

C 

OGR 

1/4 

O 

< 

12:47 Sat, May 2 

Chapter 48 Trying to Get Out 

“Let me take her.” The bodyguard clocked the arm and measured his words carefully. “All right, sir?” 

Toby didn’t move at all. 

Worse than not moving, he was staring at the bodyguard with pure, unhidden hostility, as if the man had arrived personally to take something precious from him. 

The bodyguard let two seconds pass. “Your arm isn’t working right now. Let me carry her.” 

Toby’s lips pressed white. The war behind his eyes was visible, and the stubbornness holding it in place was 

even more so. 

He finally released her, a fraction at a time, his eyes tracking every single inch of the transfer with a glare that didn’t waver. 

The boy looked exactly like someone who’d just had something essential stripped away by force. 

The bodyguard had no immediate thoughts for a moment. 

This kid is a genuine piece of work. 

He wasn’t new to his employer’s volatility or his sudden, unreadable mood shifts. 

But watching him react to being separated from his sister with this particular brand of raw, childlike aggression was something he hadn’t seen before. 

Maybe it was a stress response to the incident. 

That theory didn’t quite hold, though. Toby had been dealing with kidnapping attempts and credible threats to his life since childhood. It was essentially a standard feature of his upbringing. 

The Clark family had an unwritten rule. 

At eight years old, each child got dropped onto a sealed-off island with hundreds of other children who’d been trained with the same lethal precision, and the rules were simple. Win, or don’t come back. 

Toby had been the last one standing. 

Surviving that required more than just endurance. It required a kind of ruthlessness most people his age couldn’t have accessed even if they’d tried. 

A shooting incident traumatizing someone else? Completely believable. His employer? Essentially out of the question. 

The bodyguard landed on the only explanation that fit. 

His employer was just, fundamentally, unhinged. 

Maya, as it turned out, hadn’t come away from any of it with serious injuries. 

She was woken up, given a full physical assessment, and fully expected to be sent back to her mother. 

SAY 

OGR 

O 

2/4 

12:48 Sat, May 2 

Chapter 48 Trying to Get Out 

Instead, Toby brought her to the private villa where he was staying. 

Out of everyone involved, Toby was the only one who’d actually gotten hurt. There’s a clean fracture in his 

arm. 

He hadn’t made a single sound about it the whole time. 

Maya had always written him off as a pampered, soft boy who’d crumble under real pressure. Looking at him now, she had to revise that assessment entirely. 

By the time his arm was properly set and treated, it was well past midnight. Maya was half-gone when she heard the door open again. 

After a year of living alongside this particular brand of neurotic, she’d genuinely gotten used to him being awake at hours that had no business existing. 

She pulled the blanket up tighter and opened her eyes, watching him with quiet, careful attention. 

He didn’t appear to have any intentions involving her specifically. 

He just stood at the edge of the bed, looking at her for a moment, then dropping his gaze, then looking again. 

The room was dim. The only light came from the small lamp on the nightstand, washing everything in something soft and indistinct. 

Toby’s lashes cast shadows against the pallor of his skin. Whatever was moving through his mind, he wasn’t sharing any of it. 

Maya accepted she’d probably never crack how his mind actually worked. 

She used to figure he was just a love-starved masochist with something to prove. 

Looking at him now, closed off and still in the low light, she had to admit she couldn’t read him at all. 

He was free to stare if that’s what he wanted. 

She needed sleep. 

School was in the morning. 

Maya pulled the blanket around herself and went back under/without another thought. 

Toby’s situation was considerably worse. The fracture produced pain that was constant and grinding. making real sleep completely out of reach, and he stayed exactly where he was, watching her in silence. 

She slept like she had no concerns in the world whatsoever. 

He noticed it, sharp and a little bitter. 

There was absolutely nothing about her that gave any indication she’d smuggled a paring knife on her person and used it to stab a grown man only a few hours ago. 

12:48 Sat, May 2 

This Time I Be the Villain’s Favorite Daughter

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