[BL] Transmigrated as the Villain CEO's Mermaid Secretary

Chapter 440: Bryan Came Back

Thump.

Pause.

Thump-thump.

Like knocking on the marble tiles.

Sarah looked around, visibly disturbed by this incoming sound amidst the terrifying gunfire and ground tremors. That was when she noticed something.

She leaned a little closer to Ciel, lowered her voice, and whispered, "Hey. Hey. Where did Bryan go?"

Ciel didn’t answer right away. He was watching Julius take out the weapons without helping.

"Hm?" Ciel snapped out of his blank stare and realized she was asking something.

He blinked a couple of times and also looked around to check. "Bryan?"

"Yeah, Bryan." Sarah jutted her chin toward the empty space where Bryan had been in his own sweet world with Iris. "I thought he was with Iris this whole time. Plastered to her side like a barnacle. When did he—"

"Slipped out maybe to get some more drinks," Ciel said, his hand had drifted down the side of the cushion with a bored expression. "Or maybe he just went into the bathroom. I wasn’t really paying attention."

Clearly, Ciel wasn’t as calm as he appeared to be. After all, Julius said that all of them should be together in one place as much as possible.

"But it seemed that he was gone for a long time. Iris already finished her drink." Sarah argued persistently.

Ciel, with a fed-up expression, looked at Sarah, "Why do you even notice how many drinks one had in one glass? You’re so nosy."

"Nosy or not, my point still stands." Sarah stubbornly insisted, elbowing him.

"Ugh, I’ll ask Thiago later if he’s still not here after five minutes." Ciel made a small, dignified noise of complaint.

That was when the door on the far end of the corridor hissed open with a soft shhk, and Bryan walked back in.

Bryan wasn’t wearing the same outfit as he did earlier this evening. He was carrying two black duffel bags, one in each hand, the canvas straining at the seams. It was still the same shirt, but he had layered a tactical vest over it.

It was a matte black tactical vest with four magazine pouches across the chest. It had something that looked like a thermal grenade clipped to the right hip and an angular bulk of two sidearm holsters under the arms.

His foxy smile was gone, calm and serious like Iris and Sarah had never seen before. He also looked slightly bored and annoyed when he looked at the piling weapons that Julius had amassed on the table.

Bryan reached the living room and set both duffels down on the rug with two soft, heavy thunks. Clearly, the contents of it were not something to play around with.

"...huh," Sarah forgot to breathe, speechless.

Ciel made a small, impressed face. "Yeah."

Iris had one hand wrapped around a glass of something pale gold she had not been drinking for some time. When she saw Bryan, her brows lifted a little.

She knew that Bryan had served in the military before, since it was common knowledge. He had been so casual about it that Iris, who had grown up dodging her father’s attempts to enlist her, had just not thought of asking him about the details of it.

Iris watched as Bryan knelt on the second sofa now. She watched him thumb open the underside of the cushion.

He slid out a compartment out of something she had assumed was just a piece of furniture, and quietly rethought her impression of Bryan.

This guy is clearly in the Logistics, she thought. Probably a high rank at that.

All because of one thing, Bryan was fast. Faster than Julius, who was already pulling weapons from the matching compartment on the opposite sofa.

She knew that Julius was still handling the security of the Maxwell Corporation. Therefore, there was no surprise in his ability and speed in doing things.

But how about Bryan? Although he didn’t handle the weapons as well as Julius, he still managed to get the important things and even sorted the things that they didn’t need from Julius’s pile.

Also, Bryan skipped the pulse guns.

Just like Julius, although he probably hadn’t seen Julius pick out plasma guns over pulse guns before he went to get these two duffel bags worth of weapons.

To reach that conclusion, Bryan surely knew more about what they needed and didn’t know more than Julius did.

Iris’s mouth twitched, meaning they really know what’s going on down there.

Bryan picked up a plasma pistol and weighed it in his hand. He thumbed the cartridge release with a soft click and peered into the chamber.

He slid the cartridge back home with a confident snap and pulled a second cartridge from the duffel bag. He casually tucked the spare into the back pocket of his vest.

Then Bryan suddenly stood up, turned, and walked across the rug to Iris.

Iris stared at Bryan as he slowly approached her without saying a word.

Bryan stopped at arm’s length in front of her. He held the pistol out across his open palms. He turned the grip toward her with safety on and muzzle down.

"Have you ever fired one of these?" he asked lightly without pressuring her.

Iris looked at Bryan, then at the gun, and then closed her eyes.

She did not answer right away because this scene reminded her of her father.

Iris recalled being in the cold range under the Ackley estate when she had been fourteen. The dry crack of the practice rounds as her father repeatedly said, you are an alpha, Iris, an alpha holds the line.

She recalled how badly she had wanted to be anything other than what he had wanted her to be. The time when she had to learn how to strip, clean, load, and fire a gun regardless of her own will.

A gun, just like the gun that Bryan had been holding out to her right now.

Some part of her had known that even if these lessons were brutal, cruel, and unnecessary. Because Iris swore not to serve in the military.

However, she knew that one day this knowledge would be of use.

It was just that Iris had not thought that one day would be tonight.

Iris opened her eyes and saw Bryan waiting for her.

Bryan had not pushed the gun forward to urge her. He had not said anything either, or been annoyed at her, since this was clearly an emergency situation.

He just stood there, palms steady, eyes patient, ready to take it back the second she said no.

Iris took a deep breath and reached for the pistol. Her fingers closed around the grip with a small, unconscious adjustment of the wrist that brought her thumb to the safety.

She felt the weight settle into her hand and thought, just right.

Iris tilted the pistol forty-five degrees, dropped the magazine into her palm with a clean clack. She checked the load and slammed it home with the heel of her hand.

Then, she quickly racked the slide with a sharp kchak and snapped the safety back on with her thumb before lowering the muzzle.

The whole sequence took less than four seconds.

Ciel let out a low whistle, deeply impressed.

Thiago let out a much more impressed whistle of his own. "Ho-ho. Bryan really picked out a good sister-in-law."

Meanwhile, Sarah’s eyes were sparkling in awe.

"Oh, Iris! That was so cool. Since when did you learn this? I hadn’t seen you do this, like ever, before."

Sarah gasped excitedly.

"I myself haven’t done that in — god, has it been since the academy? It must have been since the academy. How could you still remember it? Do you just remember it? How do you just remember it?"

"If you drill it enough times, your hands will learn it," Iris said, dryly. "Even when your brain doesn’t want to."

Iris handed the pistol back to Bryan grip-first. She took the holster he wordlessly took out from one of the duffels, and clipped the whole thing to her belt at her back.

Bryan’s lips did not a smile but it softened at the corners. He looked like he was proud of his girlfriend.

But there were things that he still had to do, so he turned away to keep sorting the weapons.

BAM!

Out beyond the barrier, something hit the wall again. Harder this time, making the chandelier sway, just slightly.

Pete had walked over to the duffels that Bryan brought. He knelt down beside Bryan’s stash and started laying weapons out in tidy little rows on the rug.

"Two plasma sidearms each," he murmured, half to himself, half to the room. "One spare cartridge. Two flash bombs for the alphas, one for the omegas — no, sorry, Sarah, I know, I know, you’re a perfectly capable alpha, but you said yourself you have not fired one of these in four years, and the flash radius is unforgiving — yes, one for you, one — Ciel, dear, please put the dagger away, you are going to cut your own thumb."