Villain’s Favorite 212

Chapter 212 I Have a Friend 

“She grew up in an orphanage. Nobody ever told her why she’d been left on the front steps. 

“The director felt sorry for her and took her in.” 

The director was a good person. 

Most of the staff and volunteers were good people too. 

The world didn’t have nearly as many villains as people assumed, and there was no cruelty to speak of inside those walls. The only real competition was between the kids themselves. 

Everyone had their little strategies for scrounging extra snacks and food, and alliances formed and shifted constantly because of it. 

Maya had always had a stubborn, slightly feral edge to her from the very beginning. She hadn’t known enough about the world to be afraid of it. 

In her universe, holding your own in the orphanage and walking away from each day without being pushed around was already a good outcome. 

Then she turned eight. 

Out of nowhere, Maya was told she was the biological daughter of the city’s wealthiest man. She didn’t entirely understand what that meant. At eight, she was at the stage where the lights were mostly on but not fully. 

The jump from the orphanage to an enormous estate was, without question, thrilling. 

Then she arrived and found another girl standing beside her father, roughly her own age. 

“Hi…” Kaia had reached for her hand on instinct. 

Maya pulled away without a second thought. 

And when Thomas looked at her with that loaded, expectant expression and said “you can call me Dad,” Maya said nothing at all. 

She had no interest in giving him what he wanted. 

“Your friend…” Wendy had heard enough at this point to feel something warm stir in her chest. She pressed her lips gently to the girl’s forehead. “She had some real spirit, didn’t she?” 

“It wasn’t a great quality,” Maya said. “She knew that even then. Being pleasant costs nothing. 

“But she was eight years old. She couldn’t care less about being pleasant. She just felt completely betrayed.” 

Raymond ran his hand lightly over her head. “And then what? Did she fight back?” 

“She did,” Maya said. 

Though a child’s retaliation is always a small, powerless thing. 

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10:13 Tue, May 12 

Chapter 2121 Have a Friend 

She stubbornly refused to speak to Thomas first, ever. The dynamne between father and daughter calcifted into something rigid and cold. 

But that forgettable excuse for a father-daughter relationship didn’t matter much compared to what came 

next. 

“Kaia had a lot of friends,” Maya said. “That was obvious from the very first moment they met. 

“Wherever Kaia went, she was surrounded by people. Attendants, admirers, everyone circling her like she was the sun and they were just glad to be in her orbit. 

Saying it out loud made Maya glance briefly at Raymond. 

When she’d stayed at the Clarks’ recently, the thing that had thrown her off most was the staff. 

They didn’t speak to her unless spoken to. They didn’t look at her. They didn’t whisper or pry. 

Wherever she went, they followed at a quiet, careful distance, present without being felt. 

She’d found it strange at first and then decided she actually preferred it. 

Silent sentinels were infinitely better than the peculiar staff she’d grown up around. Maya had never understood why any household employee would behave like a malfunctioning NPC in front of a child, gushing things like “oh, how adorable she is” with that glassy, rehearsed enthusiasm. 

Once or twice was one thing. But every single time, like clockwork, it was either praise for Kaia or praise for Kaia’s direction, with the occasional offhand remark that left Maya feeling subtly smaller. It had been genuinely unhinged. 

And as the years passed, the gap between them only grew wider and more visible. 

Kaia became more beautiful and more beloved with each passing year, while Maya kept absorbing the fallout just for existing in her shadow. 

She still remembered being fifteen, when a wealthy family’s son had smiled at her and pinched her face between his fingers, his voice dripping with contempt. “You’re actually Kaia’s sister? You don’t look anything like her. You look like something that belongs in the dark.” 

She’d kicked him for it. He’d grabbed her by the back of the head and shoved her face into a basin full of water in retaliation. 

“It was cold,” Maya said. 

She lowered her eyes, sitting with the memory of that suffocating pressure, the way everything goes muffled and grey when you’re submerged and running out of fight. She paused for a moment. “Honestly. Part of me wanted to just stop right there.” 

It wasn’t that she lacked the will to survive. She was just so exhausted from struggling that her body had nothing left to spend on resistance. 

She’d thought that was the end of her. 

But he’d let her go. 

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10:1 Tue, May 12 

Chapter 212 | Have a Friend 

Right when she had no strength left to push back, he’d yanked her up by the collar and said, cold and flat, “Tell Kaia and you’re finished.” 

Maya finished and looked up at her father, who had crossed the room and was now crouching in front of 

her. 

Raymond’s face held no readable expression, but the tendons in the back of his hands stood out sharply. and his voice, when it came, was quiet and rough and carried a cold that settled into the bones. “What was his name? Do you remember?” 

Maya gave it to him without hesitating. 

“Was he the only one?” 

“Give me a second,” Maya said. 

She’d spent so much of that time in open, festering conflict with Kaia. 

The consequence of that was retaliation that kept escalating in scope. 

“After a while, I tried pulling back. Staying out of Kaia’s way entirely.” Maya had stopped using the distancing language. She’d been telling this story for a while now, and the pretense felt hollow. She kept her head down, not looking at whatever expression had settled on her parents’ faces, and worked through the memories carefully. 

“But they had some kind of pathological need for a target. The moment Kaia cried or got upset about something, they’d find a way to take it out on me.” 

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