The scent of Clyde's coffee was the first thing to permeate my consciousness, followed closely by the glorious, greasy aroma of bacon. Sunlight, real and warm, streamed through the massive windows of the safe house, painting bright rectangles on the polished concrete floor. For a single, disorienting moment, everything was perfect.
Then memory crashed back in. The shattered window. The tear gas. The terrifying efficiency with which Clyde had moved. The zip-tied man complaining about his boots.
I opened my eyes. I was alone in the vast, minimalist bed, but the space beside me was still warm. The sound of sizzling came from the kitchen. I pushed myself up, my body protesting with a symphony of aches—some from being unceremoniously shoved to the floor, others from… significantly more pleasant activities later on.
I found a US Navy t-shirt of Clyde's draped over a chair and pulled it on. It smelled like him. I padded out into the living area.
The scene that greeted me was one of such surreal domesticity that I had to stop and stare. Clyde stood at the stove, his back to me. He was wearing only a pair of grey sweatpants that hung low on his hips, and his magnificent back and shoulders were on full display, muscles flexing as he deftly flipped pancakes on a griddle. Bacon sizzled in another pan. A full pot of coffee stood ready. On the counter beside him, his secure laptop was open, displaying what looked like a real-time satellite feed next to a spreadsheet.
It was the most bizarre juxtaposition I had ever seen: high-stakes cyber-geointelligence and buttermilk pancakes.
He must have heard me, because he spoke without turning around. "I hope you're hungry. I made enough to feed a small platoon." His voice was a low, comfortable rumble.
"A small platoon of what? Very hungry SEALs?" I asked, sliding onto a stool at the breakfast bar.
He glanced over his shoulder, a smirk playing on his lips. "Exactly. Operational readiness requires caloric intake." He turned fully, holding out a mug of coffee. "Black. Just how you like it."
Our fingers brushed as I took it, and a jolt of warmth, entirely separate from the coffee, went through me. "Thank you." I took a sip. It was, of course, perfect. "You know, for a human weapon, you're ridiculously good at domestic chores."
He turned back to the pancakes. "It's all about skill transfer. Flipping a pancake uses the same wrist action as disarming a man. Seasoning eggs requires the same precision as calibrating a long-range scope."
I snorted, almost choking on my coffee. "Of course it does. I'll never look at breakfast the same way again."
He piled a plate high with pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs that looked fluffy enough to be a cloud and set it in front of me. He fixed his own plate and came to sit beside me, his thigh pressing against mine.
We ate in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, the only sound the clink of cutlery and the soft hum of his laptop. It was so normal. So peaceful. After the chaos of yesterday, it felt like a dream.
"So," I said, swirling a piece of bacon through a puddle of syrup. "The dragon. What's the plan for today, oh mighty dragon slayer?"
He finished his mouthful of eggs before answering. "First, we coordinate with Jin. The intel from our… chatty guest… gives us a few more names, a few more connections. We cross-reference that with what you found in the Dragon Slayer account." He tapped his laptop screen. "We find the head. And then we cut it off."
The words were delivered with a calm, matter-of-fact certainty that should have been chilling. Instead, it was incredibly reassuring.
"And what's my job in this daring decapitation?" I asked.
He looked at me, his expression turning serious. "You, Troy Nash, are the brains of this entire operation. You found the dragon. You showed us where it lives. Your job is to keep doing what you do better than anyone else on the planet: follow the money. Every transaction, every shell company, every hidden fee. You're our compass." He reached over and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear, his touch gentle. "I'm just the muscle that keeps the compass safe."
The simple, profound faith in his words left me speechless. He didn't see me as a liability to be protected. He saw me as the vital asset. The key.
"I think I can handle that," I said, my voice a little husky.
"Good." He stood and started clearing our plates. "Because after we do the dishes, we're going to work. My team is setting up a secure command center here. Your computers are already hooked up."
I blinked. "You brought my computers? When?"
"While you were still asleep. Cooper handled it. They're in the spare bedroom." He said it as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have a team of commandos relocate a forensic accounting lab before breakfast.
I just shook my head, a laugh bubbling up. "You know, my life used to be very quiet. It was mostly spreadsheets and quiet dinners alone."
He came around the counter and pulled me into his arms, his hands settling on my lower back. "Boring," he declared, a wicked glint in his eye. He leaned down and kissed me, a slow, deep, syrup-flavored kiss that promised danger and safety in equal measure. When he pulled back, he was grinning. "You prefer this. Admit it."
I looked around the sleek, expensive safe house, at the satellite feed on the laptop, at the incredibly dangerous, incredibly gorgeous man holding me who made pancakes and neutralized threats with the same effortless skill.
I thought about the quiet dinners alone. The empty townhouse. The life where the biggest risk was a papercut.
"Yeah," I said, smiling up at him. "I definitely prefer this."
The "spare bedroom" had been transformed. Gone was the generic hotel-art and the unused treadmill. In its place was a humming, blinking nerve center that would have made NASA jealous. My desks and monitors were set up in a U-shape, cables snaking into a formidable-looking server stack that Cooper was currently patting with affection. Jin was on a video call with what looked like the entire National Security Council, his voice a calm, low murmur. Espinoza was meticulously arranging an arsenal of weapons on a large felt mat with the care of a museum curator.
And in the middle of it all, Clyde stood, arms crossed, looking like a general surveying his troops. He'd pulled on a black tactical shirt, but the sweatpants remained, creating an outfit that was both lethally efficient and bizarrely casual.
"Welcome to the war room," he said, a slow grin spreading across his face as I stood gaping in the doorway.
"I… wow." I stepped inside, my socks silent on the plush carpet. "You guys work fast."
"Operational efficiency," Cooper said without looking up from his server. "Also, we have a lot of cool toys and we get excited."
I settled into my familiar chair, the leather creaking under me. It felt surreal, like a piece of my old life had been dropped into the middle of a spy thriller. I fired up my monitors, the familiar login screen a touchstone of normalcy.
"Alright, dragon," I muttered, cracking my knuckles. "Let's see what you're made of."
For the next several hours, we fell into a rhythm. It was a strange, beautiful, and terrifying symphony. My world was the flow of numbers on the screens—the endless columns of data, the complex algorithms I ran to trace the hidden connections. I'd call out a finding, a name, a transaction.
"Large transfer to a 'Vanguard Security' in Moldova, six months ago!"
Clyde, without missing a beat, would relay it. "Jin, run Vanguard Security. Moldova. See if it ties to any known PMCs or arms traffickers."
Jin would murmur into his headset, and a moment later, a dossier would pop up on one of my secondary monitors.
"Vanguard is a shell," I'd announce, cross-referencing the data. "But their funds are paying for… custom motorcycle parts? That can't be right."
"It's a laundering technique," Espinoza called over from his weapon-cleaning station. "Buy legit expensive goods, sell for cash under value. Clean money. My cousin's friend's brother does it with jet skis."
I blinked. "Noted."
It was like that all morning. Me, the numbers guy, unraveling the digital thread. Clyde, the conductor, orchestrating the real-world intelligence. His team, the instruments, providing the muscle and the niche knowledge about everything from Moldovan shell companies to the second-hand value of a Kawasaki Ninja.
At one point, my stomach growled so loudly it echoed in the room.
Clyde looked up from a map of the Caspian Sea he was studying. "Lunch," he declared, as if issuing a command.
"I'm in the middle of a trace," I protested, my eyes glued to a particularly tricky loop through the Bahamas.
"It'll wait. Fuel the asset." He disappeared into the kitchen and returned five minutes later with two plates. On each was a perfectly constructed turkey and avocado sandwich, cut diagonally, with a handful of baby carrots and a single, perfectly placed pickle spear.
He set one plate down next to my mousepad. "Eat."
I stared at the sandwich, then at him. "You even make sandwiches with structural integrity."
"Of course," he said, taking a bite of his own. "A poorly constructed sandwich is a morale killer."
I took a bite. It was, unsurprisingly, the best turkey sandwich I'd ever had. "You're ridiculous," I said around a mouthful.
"You love it," he shot back, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
I did. God help me, I really did.
The afternoon bled into evening. The city lights began to twinkle outside again, but inside, the artificial glow of the monitors ruled. We were close. I could feel it. The web of connections was tightening. The name 'Dragon Slayer-1' was appearing with more frequency, linked to bigger and bigger transactions.
I was tracing a massive payment to a shadowy figure known only as "The Architect" when I hit a wall. A digital fortress. Encryption I'd never seen before.
"I'm stuck," I admitted, frustration creeping into my voice. "It's like a black box. I can see money going in, but I can't see where it's going after. It's just… gone."
Clyde came to stand behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders. He studied the screen, his gaze intense. "Can you bypass it?"
"Not with my tools. This is next-level stuff. It would take…" I trailed off, the sheer audacity of the firewall daunting me.
Clyde squeezed my shoulders. "You'll figure it out. You always do." He leaned down, his lips close to my ear. "Unfocus your eyes, remember? See the whole picture."
I took a deep breath, leaning back into his solid strength. I closed my eyes for a second, letting the patterns float behind my eyelids instead of glaring at them on the screen. The transactions. The timelines. The…
My eyes snapped open. "The medical research."
Clyde went still behind me. "What about it?"
"The payments to Dr. Finch's foundation… they're not charity." I started pulling up new windows, my fingers flying across the keyboard. "They're a key. A backdoor. Look at the timing. Every large deposit into Dragon Slayer is followed, within 48 hours, by a payment to the foundation. But the amounts don't match the research grants. They're smaller. Precise."
I ran a new algorithm, cross-referencing the amounts. The numbers danced on the screen, then resolved into a stunningly simple pattern.
"They're passcodes," I breathed, my heart hammering. "The amounts themselves are the encryption key to the next layer of the firewall. They're hiding the dragon's hoard behind a donation to cure Alzheimer's." The sheer, twisted brilliance of it was horrifying.
The room was utterly silent. Even Espinoza had stopped cleaning his gun.
Clyde's hands tightened on my shoulders. "You are a goddamn genius," he whispered, his voice full of awe.
He straightened up, and when he spoke again, his voice was the clear, commanding tone of a man who had his target locked. "Jin. Get me everything we have on every transaction to that foundation for the last five years. Cooper, I need a secure line to Fort Meade. Tell them we're sending them a key and we need a door unlocked. Now."
The room erupted into a controlled frenzy of activity. But Clyde stayed behind me for a second longer. He bent down and pressed a firm, quick kiss to the top of my head.
"Slay that dragon, partner," he murmured.
And with the taste of turkey sandwich and the ghost of his kiss on my hair, I went back to work, the final wall crumbling before me. We had them.
The air in the war room was so thick with tension you could have chewed it. The only sounds were the frantic clatter of my keyboard, the low hum of the server stack, and the occasional terse, muttered command from Clyde or Jin. We were a well-oiled machine, a bizarre fusion of forensic accounting and special ops, and we were seconds from striking the heart of the beast.
The final encryption key—disguised as a charitable donation to save humanity from dementia—had worked. The last digital fortress wall crumbled before my eyes, and the innermost sanctum of the Dragon Slayer account lay bare on my main monitor.
A vast, staggering sum of money glowed on the screen. It was so large it felt abstract, a number in a video game. But it was real. And it was connected to every dirty deal, every smuggled weapon, every act of destabilization we'd been tracking.
"I'm in," I announced, my voice sounding calmer than I felt. "The core account. It's all here."
Clyde was at my side in an instant, his hand coming to rest on the back of my chair. "Can you trace the outgoing authority? Who has the keys to the kingdom?"
I was already on it. My fingers flew, pulling up administrative logs, access records. "There's a primary authorizing signature. All major transfers require a dual-key encryption from this terminal." I followed the digital breadcrumbs, my heart hammering against my ribs. This was it. The head of the snake.
A name appeared. An identity. Not a code name. A real, registered name attached to a physical address.
"Got him," I whispered, the words barely audible.
The room fell completely silent. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me.
"Who is it?" Clyde asked, his voice low and deadly calm.
I read the name aloud. It was nobody I'd ever heard of. Some nondescript name like "John Smith." But the address… the address was a penthouse apartment in a famously exclusive, secure building in the city. The kind of place that had its own private security force and required a blood sample and a family tree to get past the lobby.
A slow, predatory smile spread across Clyde's face. It was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I'd ever seen. "Jin. Get me schematics for that building. Every floor plan, every air duct, every service entrance. Espinoza, I want a full inventory of the building's security detail—numbers, shifts, armament. Cooper, I need a quiet, untraceable vehicle downstairs in ten minutes."
The room exploded into a new kind of activity, a controlled storm of preparation. Clyde's team moved with a purpose that was breathtaking to watch. They were going to war.
Clyde turned to me. His expression was fierce, proud, and filled with a terrifying tenderness. "You did it, Troy. You found him." He cupped my face, his thumb stroking my cheek. "Now I'm going to go bring him in."
The reality of what was about to happen crashed down on me. He was going to walk out that door and into a potentially lethal situation. The fear was a cold fist in my gut. I grabbed his wrist, my fingers tightening. "Be careful."
He leaned in, his forehead resting against mine. "Always." He kissed me, hard and quick, a promise and a goodbye all in one. "Lock the door behind me. Jin will be on comms with you the whole time. You're safe here."
And then he was gone, swept up in the whirlwind of his team's preparation. I heard the door to the safe house snick shut. The sudden silence was deafening.
I stood there, alone in the high-tech war room, surrounded by the evidence of our victory and the terrifying emptiness of his absence. Jin was on the video feed, his face a mask of professional calm.
"They're en route, Mr. Nash," he said gently. "Twenty-minute ETA. Why don't you sit down? I'll walk you through the op in real-time if you like. It's quite something to see."
I sank into my chair, my legs suddenly weak. I didn't want a play-by-play. I just wanted him to come back.
The twenty minutes felt like twenty years. I stared at the door, my mind conjuring every worst-case scenario imaginable. Visions of gunfights in opulent hallways, of Clyde being overpowered, of…
My phone buzzed on the desk. A text. From Clyde.
The breath rushed out of me in a dizzying wave. My hands shook as I picked it up.
It wasn't words. It was a picture.
The image was slightly blurry, taken from a low angle. It showed a man in a ridiculously expensive silk dressing gown, his hands zip-tied behind his back, sitting on the floor of what looked like a marble foyer. He was scowling. And standing over him, one combat boot planted firmly on the man's thigh, was Clyde. He was holding his phone in a selfie grip, giving a thumbs-up to the camera. In the background, I could see Espinoza casually disassembling a large abstract painting, presumably looking for a safe.
The caption below the image read: Dragon successfully captured. A little anticlimactic. He tried to threaten me with his lawyer. Picking up Chinese on the way home. You want dumplings?
I stared at the photo. I looked at Jin's face on the monitor, who was trying and failing to hide a smile. And then I started to laugh. It was a wild, relieved, slightly unhinged sound that echoed in the empty room.
He'd taken a selfie. After capturing an international criminal mastermind in his pajamas, he'd stopped to take a selfie and ask me about dumplings.
I typed back, my fingers trembling with laughter and relief: Extra dumplings. And tell Espinoza to put the painting back. It's probably worth more than my house.
The reply was almost instantaneous: Copy that.
I put the phone down, the weight of the world lifting from my shoulders. I looked around the room, at the screens full of numbers that had started this whole thing, at the weapons laid out on the felt mat.
The dragon was slayed. Not with a epic sword fight, but with a forensic accountant and a Navy SEAL who worried about the structural integrity of sandwiches and remembered to text for dinner orders.
Jin cleared his throat on the monitor. "See, Mr. Nash? I told you it would be fine. Standard operating procedure."
I grinned, wiping a tear of laughter from my eye. "Yeah, Jin. Standard procedure."
The high of the selfie—the sheer, absurd, glorious normalcy of "picking up Chinese on the way home" in the midst of a top-secret takedown—lasted about as long as it took for the safe house door to open again. The man who walked in wasn't the Clyde who had left.
This Clyde moved with a different kind of energy. The focused, lethal purpose was gone, replaced by a quiet, bone-deep weariness. He still moved with that innate grace, but it was the grace of a predator after a successful hunt, sated and ready for denning. He had changed out of the tactical gear and back into the soft sweatpants and a fresh grey henley. He carried two large paper bags smelling gloriously of soy sauce and fried dough.
But his eyes. His eyes held the weight of what he'd just done. They were the same pale blue, but the light in them was banked, the intensity softened into something more contemplative, more… raw.
"I come bearing dumplings," he announced, his voice a low rumble that seemed to fill the quiet space. He set the bags on the kitchen counter with a soft thud.
Jin, Cooper, and Espinoza had melted away after a few quiet words with him, leaving us alone. The war room was dark, the monitors sleeping. It was just us, the city lights, and the smell of Chinese food.
"I see that," I said, walking over to him. I didn't ask about the mission. I didn't need to. The picture had said enough, and the look in his eyes said the rest. Instead, I reached up and gently traced the faint, purpling bruise on his cheekbone. "You're home."
He caught my hand, turning his head to press a kiss into my palm. The gesture was so tender it made my heart ache. "Yeah," he breathed, his voice muffled against my skin. "I'm home."
We ate straight from the containers, standing at the kitchen counter. He was ravenous, devouring dumplings and kung pao chicken with a single-minded focus. I picked at my food, content to watch him, to see the tension in his shoulders slowly begin to ease with each bite.
When he was finally done, he let out a long, slow breath and looked at me. The weariness was still there, but now it was edged with a quiet warmth. "Thank you," he said.
"For what? The moral support?"
"For being here," he said simply. "For being the reason I get to come home to this." He gestured vaguely between us, at the food, at the safe, quiet apartment. "It… matters."
I understood. After the violence and the pressure, the simple act of sharing a meal in silence was its own kind of balm.
He cleaned up the containers with his usual efficiency, then turned to me. "I need a shower," he said. "And then I need to not think for about twelve hours."
The shower turned on down the hall. I expected him to go alone, to wash the mission away by himself. But a moment later, he reappeared in the doorway, his hand extended. "Come on."
It wasn't a question. It was an invitation. A need.
I took his hand and let him lead me into the large, steam-filled bathroom. This wasn't about passion. It was about closeness. About washing away the grime of the day, both literal and metaphorical, together.
He undressed me slowly, his movements deliberate and gentle. Then he did the same for himself. He led me under the hot spray, and we stood there for a long moment, just letting the water sluice over us, his forehead resting against mine.
He took the soap and began to wash me. It was the same ritual as before, but different. Slower. More profound. His hands moved over my skin with a reverence that felt like a silent conversation. This is what I protect. This is what is real. This is mine. He paid special attention to my hands, the ones that had typed the commands that unraveled an empire, massaging the palms and each finger with a care that felt almost worshipful.
When it was my turn, I took the soap. I lathered my hands and began to wash his chest, his arms, his back. I felt the powerful muscles, the faint scars, the history written on his skin. I washed away the lingering scent of smoke and adrenaline, replacing it with the clean scent of sandalwood. I felt him shudder under my touch, not with desire, but with the release of a terrible, held-in tension. I was washing away the dragon's blood.
We dried each other off with large, fluffy towels, the silence between us comfortable and deep. He led me to the bedroom and pulled back the covers. We slipped underneath, and he immediately gathered me into his arms, pulling my back against his chest, his nose buried in my damp hair. He held me like I was something precious, something he needed to anchor himself to the world.
"Tell me something good," he murmured into the dark, his voice thick with sleep. "Something quiet."
I thought for a moment, my hand covering his where it rested on my stomach. "When I was ten," I began softly, "my dad taught me how to change a tire on his old pickup truck. I got grease everywhere, and I was so proud. We went out for ice cream after, and I got a double scoop of mint chocolate chip. He let me have it even though it was almost dinner time."
He was silent for so long I thought he'd fallen asleep. Then his arms tightened around me. "That's a good memory," he whispered, his voice rough with emotion. "Thank you."
Within minutes, his breathing evened out into the deep, steady rhythm of sleep. I lay there in the circle of his arms, listening to his heart beat against my back, feeling the weight of his protection and his trust.
The dragon was slayed. The world was safer. But here, in the dark, the most important thing was the steady breath of the man behind me, finally at peace. I smiled into the darkness, surrounded by his strength and his silence, and knew, without a doubt, that I was home.