Villain’s Favorite 213

Chapter 213 Honest Story 

For the Maya of that time, whether anyone in the world liked her had stopped mattering entirely. 

Nobody actively hurting her was already enough. 

Living was just so exhausting. 

Disgusting. 

Raymond had never heard a story this revolting in his life. 

Fisher 

His complexion had gone noticeably off, the sickened quality of it settling into something almost ashen, and he needed a long moment before he could fully surface from it. 

Raymond had ended many lives and witnessed countless cruelties, but this particular cruelty, coming out of Maya’s mouth in that quiet, matter-of-fact voice, wedged itself somewhere behind his ribs and wouldn’t shift. 

“The ones who hurt you,” he said. “Can you give me their names?” 

Maya looked into his eyes and nodded, then made a point of repeating two names with extra clarity. 

Raymond nodded. “Anyone else?” 

Every single one of them, he thought, his face still drained of color and his expression absolutely glacial. 

Every last one. Will be going to hell. 

Wendy didn’t have Raymond’s restraint. 

She held Maya and her hands were trembling, faintly but unmistakably, and something had lodged itself in her throat that made speech impossible. 

Wendy had spent years drowning in anxiety and grief over the fact that she couldn’t protect her children from everything the world had to offer. 

The saving grace she’d always clung to was that her kids were more likely to be the ones terrorizing society than suffering at its hands. 

She’d never once imagined she’d have a daughter who had been treated this way. 

And not by one person. A whole crowd of them. If she’d been there to see it happen, she’d have come apart entirely. 

Wendy cried in a way that was genuinely devastating to witness, tears streaking her face and ruining her makeup completely, her nose flushed red, her arms wound around Maya so tightly there was no space left between them. “They all hurt you,” she managed, barely. 

How could anyone? 

Maya hadn’t entirely anticipated this before she started talking. 

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Chapter 213 Honest Story 

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She’d braced herself to be the one who broke first. Instead, it was her mother’s tears that fell before her own. 

She scrambled to wipe them away, pressing her palms gently to her mother’s face. “Don’t cry, Mom. I was actually pretty tough about it.” 

On the day she’d decided to end things, Maya had taken that absolute-rock-bottom logic of “I’ve got nothing left anyway” and walked out with a knife, half-intending to see how many of the people who’d made her life unbearable she could get to before the end. 

That day, she’d slipped away and found the party they were all at, and anyone who’d dared to come near her, she’d put a knife in them without a second of hesitation. 

She was already planning to die. What happened after wasn’t her problem. 

Oh, right. She had a terrible excuse for a father. 

The mess would land on Thomas, obviously. The thought of him picking up his phone and hearing the news, having to clean up after her for once in his life, had given her a sliver of bitter, fierce satisfaction. 

Maya kept wiping her mother’s face. “Mom, I really was strong. I didn’t just take it.” 

She’d fought back. 

“Yes,” Wendy said, her voice wrecked. “You’ve always been brave and strong.” 

She was crying harder for it. 

She’d always meant those words. She’d believed them completely. 

And that was precisely why the grief of it was so unbearable. 

In her heart, a Maya raised inside love should have grown into the most fearless, luminous, unstoppable child in the world. 

She wasn’t supposed to be a girl who’d quietly closed the door on her own life before she’d had the chance to live it. 

Maya pressed her cheek softly against her mother’s, trying to bring the temperature of the room down a little. “Dad,” she said, voice gentle. “You already suspected something, didn’t you?” 

Raymond in silence was a different creature from Raymond in motion. 

His expression had gone heavy and still, the easiness from earlier nowhere to be found. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “But hearing you say it out loud is still… a lot to sit with.” 

Maya’s aversion to wealth had always been too sharp and too instinctive to be nothing. The way she flinched and drew back in certain situations, the way her body locked up around certain kinds of people, had made him suspect more than once that something serious had happened to her. 

But she was also a child who healed from the inside out, carrying things quietly and without complaint. 

For that kind of resilience to develop, he’d suspected the wound underneath it had to be something significant. 

10:13 Tue, May 12 

Chapter 213 Honest Story 

Hearing the story, he finally understood. 

So that was what her childhood had been. 

Thomas.” Wendy said, fury and heartbreak tangled together in her voice, squeezing Maya like she intended to pull her all the way into herself. “That horrible, horrible man. He let you wither away like that. Maya. My Maya.” 

She was crying so hard now that the grief seemed to fill the entire room. 

She was hurting so deeply that Maya found herself unable to cry at all. She kept busy wiping her mother’s face with urgent, clumsy tenderness. 

Raymond stood up and opened the laptop sitting on the desk nearby. 

“Maya,” he said, “if you need to cry, you can cry into your mom. She’s right there. 

“When you’re done, pull yourself together and tell me which ones you actually consider your enemies. Can you do that?” 

His voice carried the same composed steadiness it always did. 

But his jaw was tight, and something behind his eyes was working very hard to stay contained. 

He searched through files with one hand and thought, quietly, that they would raise her again. 

They’d cut out everything that had gone rotten, and fill in everything that had been hollowed out, and put the pieces back together with patience and time. 

Everything that had belonged to her, everything that had been ground down underfoot, they would give 

back to her. 

But first, the problem had to be solved at the root. 

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