Villain’s Favorite 51

 

Chapter 51 Very Unstable 

Lawrence wasn’t entirely stable in his own mind, either. 

He’d genuinely found Alfred’s logic persuasive. 

If he died, his father would have to look at his only remaining child eventually, wouldn’t he? 

So he’d gone and died. 

Firm heg 

The memory of it settled over him now as he curled up in his chair, eyes downcast, expression docile and contained, biting down hard on the back of his hand. 

It was a habitual gesture. Maya used to try to correct it every time she caught him doing it, and after enough failed attempts, she’d given up and stopped bothering. 

But what about his sister? 

He wondered if she had found happiness after he was gone. 

Maya had absolutely no idea that both her parents had just attempted to have Thomas killed, and that both attempts had fallen apart completely. 

She spent a full week at home recovering, and her father stayed home too, stretched out beside her in the most committed display of doing nothing she’d ever witnessed. 

With nothing else to occupy her, Maya kept stealing Raymond’s glasses off his face. 

She’d never understood why he always wore them. 

Raymond’s looks weren’t striking or intense. He had the kind of face that read as quietly refined, pale complexion, soft features, the sort of person who blended into any room. 

Put the glasses on top of that, and add the permanent look of someone who hadn’t slept properly in years, and you had a portrait of the most harmless office drone imaginable. 

She pulled the glasses off him again. 

On a whim, she slid them onto her own face. 

She’d expected her vision to blur immediately. 

Instead, everything stayed sharp and clear. 

She blinked a few times, and it hit her. These glasses had zero prescription in them. They were purely decorative. 

“Dad. These glasses don’t actually do anything?” 

Raymond smiled. “Nope.” 

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Chapter 51 Very Unstable 

He lifted them off her upturned nose and settled them back onto his own face. 

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“So you wear glasses specifically to look like an academic?” Maya asked from her position curled against him. 

Raymond considered that for a moment, lounging on the sofa. 

Honestly, that wasn’t inaccurate. 

His face was forgettable in the best possible way, not the kind that made anyone look twice. 

The problem was that he’d taken enough lives over the years that whatever quality living people naturally carried, that warm, present energy, had been steadily eroded out of him. People with sharp instincts picked up on it the moment they got close, a low-level wrongness they couldn’t name. 

A pair of unremarkable black frames made him look tired and ordinary and completely unthreatening. 

Back when he’d run operations with a crew, he’d been the least visible person in every room. 

Most criminals leaned toward the extreme or the conspicuous. 

Raymond was their precise opposite. 

He preferred to be boring, unnoticed, and quietly dangerous, and in his experience, no one ever suspected the person they’d already stopped looking at. 

Not long ago, he’d played that role to perfection, drifting through a crowd, passing close to a targeted official, and putting a blade into him with a pleasant smile while everyone’s attention was elsewhere. 

No one had even registered the movement. 

Who suspects the meek, exhausted, slightly pitiful office worker, anyway? 

Something shifted in Raymond’s expression without warning. The softness drained out of it, and the smile that replaced it had very little warmth left in it at all. 

The change in the air was palpable enough that Maya, with her finely tuned perception, felt distinctly uncomfortable. 

She reached up and grabbed a fistful of his hair, interrupting whatever dark place his thoughts had been wandering toward, and decided this was a good time to say something practical. 

“Dad, I think you might be going a little thin up here.” 

Raymond’s hand went immediately to his own hair, and he lodged his complaint with complete conviction. “That’s because you keep yanking it out.” 

The girl had a habit of pulling at his hair whenever she felt like it. 

Maya rejected this entirely. “I do not. 

“You were born with less hair than most people. Also, Dad, why do you always work nights?” 

If it weren’t for Raymond’s thoroughly unhurried, borderline languid personality, she’d genuinely start to 

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Chapter 51 Very Unstable 

suspect her father was some kind of creature that operated exclusively in darkness. 

Out every night, back during the day. 

That was strange behavior for a person. 

Foushed 

Raymond was vague on the details whenever this topic came up, as always. He pulled her close and launched into his grievances. “Night pay is better. And honestly, working nights is peaceful. You have no idea what I deal with. The whole office turns on me, everyone gangs up on me, and the clients are completely unreasonable. 

“I am the most put-upon person on this entire planet.” 

Wendy, cutting fruit nearby, paused her movement for just a second. 

The people he’d sent to the afterlife with a single bullet would have found that statement deeply unsatisfying to hear. 

But Raymond was being entirely sincere in his suffering. 

His colleagues were all, in his considered opinion, unwell. He hated working alongside them. 

All he’d ever wanted was a quiet life with his wife and his kid. 

Maya knew her father worked hard. She reached up and patted his hair with genuine tenderness, then made her solemn declaration. “I’m never pulling your hair again!” 

Partly because she actually cared. And partly because the man was clearly losing ground up there. 

Raymond was deeply moved and believed her completely. 

He’d been thinking about updating his look when he had a free afternoon. 

He flipped open the lifestyle magazine sitting beside him, and his eyes landed on a model with a slicked- back hairstyle wearing a tailored leather jacket, and he fell into a prolonged moment of consideration. 

He wondered how a look like that would work on him. 

For Maya, the shape of her life right now was this: her father was fully committed to doing nothing, her mother was as stunning as ever, her brother was out earning money, and she herself was contentedly living off her family without a single productive ambition. 

Honestly, a bright future for everyone. 

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This Time I Be the Villains Favorite Daughter