Villainess is being pampered by her beast husbands-Chapter 418 --

Kaya looked at him like he’d offered her rotten meat.

"Really bad idea."

She stepped closer, gaze hard. "Now it’s my turn. Where did you find those people?"

There was a pause. The kind where everyone waits for the room to change.

Liam’s lips curved. "Nah," he said. "Now’s not the mood. Let’s talk later."

Something in Kaya boiled over so fast it didn’t even show on her face at first.

"Very fine."

She grabbed his collar and yanked him forward. His body scraped the stone as she dragged him, his boots kicking, shoulders twisting.

"What are you?" he snapped, suddenly not so smug.

Kaya smiled, and it wasn’t sweet. "Do you know what we do with prisoners?"

The cave went silent.

Veer stiffened. Cutie’s eyes widened a fraction. Sparrow froze like he didn’t know whether to breathe or run. They’d seen Kaya cold before—Mongoole, assassins—but this was different. This was personal.

Kaya shoved open a large wooden box, the kind meant to store clothes, and without hesitation she threw Liam inside.

The moment he hit the wood, his whole tone changed.

"Wait—what are you doing? Wait, wait—hey! Hey!"

Kaya closed the lid.

There was a small hole—just enough air to keep him alive. Not enough comfort to keep him calm.

She pressed the latch like she meant it.

No cell. No mercy. Just a box and time.

Then she walked back to the stone table like this was normal, like she hadn’t just buried a man alive in a wooden chest.

Her eyes went to Sparrow’s battered body.

"Are you fine?" she asked, and there was a little tenderness in her voice this time—small, but real.

Sparrow blinked, surprised by it, then nodded. "Yeah."

He hesitated. "But... how did you know he was chasing us?"

Kaya’s mouth twitched. "Next time when I don’t feel like kicking you, remember something is wrong."

Everyone paused.

"Wait, what?" Veer blurted.

Kaya shrugged, calm again. "I doubted it from the start. Do you really believe someone would throw a half-dying sparrow at us and he’d recover without any medicine? After being beaten that badly?"

No one answered, because it sounded stupid when she said it out loud.

Then Cutie asked, quieter, sharper: "But how did you know he jinxed everyone?"

Kaya’s eyes narrowed as she replayed it. "Before Cutie got hit, I saw it. That damn sparrow—on the ground—looked at us, then looked at Cutie." Her voice dropped. "And then Cutie got hit."

Cutie’s jaw tightened.

Kaya kept going, steady and sure. "I didn’t believe in misfortune or jinx either. But when Sparrow told me his ability works like that, I started watching. And then everything made sense."

She leaned back slightly. "How did we escape the capital so easily? After all the blood. After everything I did. Beastmen can smell. They should have been on us."

The room shifted again. Because now everyone could feel it—how strange that escape had been.

Veer frowned. "But how did you know he jinxed ’me’? I’m fine."

Kaya turned her head to him. "He didn’t jinx me exactly. You were the one he could see." She lifted a brow. "That time you were flying. The storm. The rain."

Veer’s eyes widened. "So that bastard jinxed me?"

"Yeah," Kaya said flatly. "Maybe. I kept him in my pocket most of the time. So he couldn’t do much. But it was enough."

Veer swallowed, anger rising in his throat.

Sparrow’s voice came small. "But I wasn’t bitten. I wasn’t injured like Cutie. So how were you sure I was jinxed?"

Kaya paused, then smiled—quiet, sharp, almost amused.

"Because," she said, "I didn’t get the urge to beat you at all this whole time."

Sparrow stared like he didn’t know whether to be offended or terrified.

Kaya didn’t say anything. She just stared at him, because this wasn’t new for her—it started the first day she saw Sparrow lying on the ground.

At first she felt worried. Then the other feeling came in, the one she trusts more: doubt. Kaya has lived in danger for too long, so her mind always looks for traps. She kept watching Sparrow, even when she felt bad about it, because something about him didn’t match. He looked half-dead, but his body didn’t look ruined the way it should.

After that, she began to notice small things. Cutie would get hurt right after someone watched him for a moment. Veer would slip at the worst time. Little bad luck, again and again. Kaya tried to tell herself it was nothing, but it kept happening in a way that felt planned.

Then one day she was ready to hit Sparrow for hiding things, and suddenly she couldn’t. The urge just disappeared. No anger, no shouting, nothing. That scared her more than anything, because Kaya only loses her temper with people she cares about. When she doesn’t care, she goes cold and doesn’t even look at them.

So when she came back to the vulture tribe and still felt nothing toward Sparrow, she understood something was wrong with her feelings. That’s why she started watching even harder.

She noticed the cousin was always nearby when bad luck happened—lying around, acting harmless, always close enough. So Kaya put Sparrow near him on purpose to check the pattern.

And when she saw the cousin’s eyes slowly turning toward Sparrow again, Kaya didn’t wait. Her gut screamed that something bad would happen the moment he looked properly.

So she attacked first. Because she refused to let Sparrow pay the price just so she could be "sure."

.

.

.

Veer broke the silence, hands on his hips, staring at the wooden box like it had personally offended him.

"So what are we gonna do with this bastard?"

Kaya didn’t look at Veer right away. Her eyes stayed on the box, calm and sharp, like she was counting seconds in her head.

"We’re not killing him," she said. "Not yet."

Cutie’s brows lifted. Sparrow’s shoulders loosened a little, then tightened again.

’Damn it, why....why again’