Villain’s Favorite 198

Chapter 198 Hello, New Guardian 

She didn’t reach for his sleeve or close the distance between them. She simply held her ground, tipped her face up with a bright smile, and said, “Good evening, Edric.” 

Edric glanced down at her. 

His expression stayed perfectly composed, but Maya got the distinct impression that he’d smiled, just barely, before turning and heading out with a quiet sound of acknowledgment. 

Maya fell into step behind him, and the moment they rounded the corner out of the study, they walked straight into her three brothers in the middle of what appeared to be a heated disagreement. 

George spotted her first. 

He dropped the argument with Toby immediately and raised a hand in a small, beckoning wave. “Come here, Maya.” 

Maya didn’t hesitate for a single second. She trotted right over to him. 

Compared to the unfamiliar Edric, these three were the closest thing to solid ground she had. 

“Grandpa actually let you out?” George studied her expression and decided she seemed to be holding up well enough, all things considered. 

She was nothing like him. Every other visit home, he found himself in the proverbial penalty box, with Grandpa cracking down on his every move. 

“Yes, but…” Maya nodded quickly, twice in a row, “Grandpa handed me straight off to Edric. 

“Edric says he’ll send me back in a week.” 

Something about this Edric felt genuinely strange to her, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. 

“A week?” George repeated, turning the timeline over in his head. “That’s actually not too bad.” 

He leaned down, bringing himself closer to eye level, and looked at his little sister with the utmost sincerity. 

“Don’t talk to Edric unless you have to. Something’s off with him.” 

“What do you mean, off?” 

Her eyes traveled from George to Toby to Alfred, both of whom had stayed conspicuously 

16:34 Sat, May 9 M… 

New scandian 

quiet. 

George thought it over for a moment and then started listing things off. 

“He’s never approved of how I live my life. He made it his personal project to fix me, and I paid for it more than once when he had people come around to set me straight. 

“One time I almost got stabbed, and when he found out, he didn’t bat an eye. He actually had the nerve to lecture me and say it was what I deserved for running around the way I do.” 

Yeah, right. What he deserved. 

He knew perfectly well who’d sent those people. 

George, for all his flaws, would never arrange something like that for his own brother. 

But Edric, that deceptively composed and utterly ruthless individual, absolutely could and would. 

Maya stood in silence for a long moment after that. 

Toby had his own things to add on the subject of Edric. 

He dropped his gaze, and when he spoke, there was something quietly grinding in his voice. 

“Edric is the kind of person who, if two ants on the sidewalk deviated from the path he’d mentally assigned them, would pick both ants up and put them back.” 

He’d encountered Edric a handful of times as a child. 

Edric had sat with him and played with building blocks on a few of those occasions. 

He would walk Toby through each step in that gentle, unhurried voice of his. 

But the moment Toby stopped listening and did things his own way, Edric would knock the whole structure down with a calm smile and tell him to start over. 

It had been absolutely infuriating. 

The man was unhinged. 

Watching both of her brothers deliver these testimonies with complete and utter seriousness, Maya hesitated before voicing the thought that had been quietly forming. “So if I’m with him, 

is he going to decide he doesn’t like me and just… get rid of me?” 

She recognized, even as she said it, that it sounded a little dramatic. 

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16:35 Sat, May 9 M… 

But both George and Toby went silent at the exact same time. 

Then George reached out, grabbed Alfred from where he was standing nearby, and nudged him forward. 

“Have him come with you,” George said with easy, affectionate warmth. “Edric actually has a real soft spot for you, Alfred. Stick with Maya, yeah?” 

These two had always been inseparable anyway. 

With Alfred along, it’d be fine. 

“Don’t worry,” Alfred said without any hesitation whatsoever. He wrapped his arms around his sister and made his promise with full and earnest gravity. “I will keep both of us alive.” 

Maya stared at him. 

It really didn’t have to escalate to sheer survival. 

Edric wasn’t some kind of maniac. 

Toby watched the girl’s thoroughly unimpressed expression, ran out of patience with the two of them clinging to each other, and pulled her forward to stand in front of him. His voice dropped, carrying a thread of genuine urgency. 

“Edric has antisocial personality disorder. I’m not joking, Maya.” 

Maya looked up at him, and the response came out of her completely on reflex. “Isn’t that basically the same as you?” 

Toby went very still. “I am not antisocial.” 

His self-awareness had always been one of his more reliable qualities. 

He had a clear sense of where everyone and everything belonged in the world, himself included. 

But Edric was different. 

Edric was like a ship drifting across open water with no destination and no compass, cut loose from everything, adrift in a way that had no name. 

Alfred spoke up then, his voice carrying a small, genuine note of confusion. 

“Why are both of you so scared of him? Edric is a good person.” 

George raised an eyebrow. “What about me, then?” 

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Alfred looked at him, and the memory of being dragged to his knees surfaced immediately. “You’re bad.” 

Then Toby asked, “And me?” 

Alfred looked at him too. “Same.” 

Toby had absolutely nothing to say to that. 

Maya barely managed to hold back her laughter. 

Toby exhaled slowly, looked away, and brought his gaze back to Maya with the energy of someone issuing a final, non-negotiable warning. 

“Keep your distance from him.” 

Maya nodded, agreeing without hesitation. 

But she already knew, somewhere quiet and certain inside her, that the warning was essentially decorative. 

She and Edric weren’t equals in age or standing. Whether she could keep any real distance from him had never been her choice to make. 

Edric was, in every sense, a workaholic, perpetually busy. 

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