The comfortable haze of the afternoon, with its silly documentary and Clyde's solid warmth at my back, was shattered by a sharp, frantic knocking at the front door. We both jolted. Clyde went from relaxed to a coiled spring in a nanosecond, his arm tightening around me.
"You expecting company?" he asked, his voice low and already assessing the threat level.
"No," I whispered, my heart doing a nervous tap-dance against my ribs. "No one."
He was on his feet silently, moving to the door with that predator's grace, positioning himself to the side of the peephole. He looked out, and the tension in his shoulders shifted from potential hostile to major annoyance. He let out a short, exasperated sigh. "It's your ex."
"Leo?" The name came out as a disbelieving squeak. What on earth was he doing here? The memory of him dropping me off once, years ago, surfaced. He knew where I lived. Of course he did.
The knocking started again, more insistent now. "Troy! I know you're in there! Please! It's important!"
Clyde looked at me, one eyebrow raised in a silent question. Do you want me to make him disappear?
I shook my head. Annoyance warred with a grudging sense of obligation. Leo was a pain, but he wasn't malicious. Just… deeply, profoundly clueless. "I'll talk to him. It's the only way he'll leave."
Clyde gave a curt nod but didn't move from his post, a silent, looming presence of backup.
I took a steadying breath and opened the door.
Leo stood on my welcome mat, looking like he'd been pulled through a hedge backward. His designer shirt was wrinkled, his hair was a mess, and his eyes were wide and panicked. He was wringing his hands, a picture of abject misery.
"Troy," he breathed, his voice trembling. "Oh, thank God. I've been calling and calling. You have to… after what happened, on the news, they said there was an incident at a restaurant… I just… I was so worried."
He was babbling. I held up a hand. "Leo, slow down. I'm fine. Everything's fine. You didn't need to come here."
"But I did!" he insisted, his voice cracking. "I heard about it and I just… I felt so helpless! You're out here, in danger, and I'm just… I'm just useless!"
This was a new level of dramatic, even for Leo. "Leo, really, it's handled. I'm okay."
"But you might not be!" he cried, his eyes welling up. "And I can't… I can't protect you! I can't do anything! But I thought… maybe this…"
He fumbled in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, his hands shaking so badly he could barely function. My patience, already thin, was evaporating. What was he doing?
Finally, he pulled out not a handkerchief, but something heavy and dark, wrapped clumsily in a silk scarf. He thrust the bundle toward me.
"Here," he said, his voice a desperate whisper. "Take it. It's my father's. He's got others. I just… it's the only thing I could think of. For protection."
The scarf fell away, and I was staring at the cold, blue-steel finish of a compact handgun.
I recoiled as if he'd brandished a snake. "Leo! What the hell is wrong with you?!"
Behind me, I felt more than heard Clyde's sharp intake of breath. He didn't move, but the air around us went from annoyed to dangerously cold.
Leo flinched, holding the gun awkwardly, clearly terrified of the thing himself. "I know! I know it's crazy! But I don't know how to fight! I can't… I can't do what he does!" He jerked his chin toward where he knew Clyde was standing. "This is all I could give you. Please. Just take it. So I know you're safe. So I can sleep at night."
He was crying now, tears tracking through the product in his hair. It was a spectacular display of hysterical, misguided concern. He wasn't a threat. He was a tragedy.
Before I could form a response—which was going to involve several very loud, very choice words—Clyde was there.
He didn't step between us. He simply appeared at my side, his presence a calming, solid force. He moved with a deliberate slowness that was somehow more intimidating than any rush.
"Leo," Clyde said, his voice calm, low, and utterly controlled. It was the voice you'd use on a spooked animal. "You need to put that away. Now."
Leo stared at him, his eyes wide with a fresh wave of fear. He was holding the gun like it was a live bomb. "I just… I wanted to help…"
"I know you did," Clyde said, his tone surprisingly gentle, though his eyes were hard. "But this isn't the way. Giving him a weapon he's not trained to use puts him in more danger, not less." He held out his hand, palm up. "Give it to me. Carefully."
Leo, sobbing with relief at being given instructions, practically threw the gun into Clyde's waiting hand. Clyde's fingers closed around it, and with a few efficient, practiced movements, he cleared the chamber, checked the safety, and made it inert. The entire process took two seconds.
"Now," Clyde said, his voice still calm but leaving no room for argument. "You're going to go home, Leo. You're going to take a breath then sleep this off. Troy is safe. I am here to ensure that. You don't need to help. Your help… complicates things."
Leo nodded frantically, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. "Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I just… I care about him."
"I know," Clyde said. His arm came around my shoulders, pulling me firmly against his side. A clear, unmistakable message. He's mine. I've got this. "But caring from a distance is what's best for everyone now. Understood?"
"Understood," Leo whispered. He gave me one last, miserable look, then turned and shuffled back to his car, a picture of abject defeat.
Clyde didn't move until Leo's car had pulled away. Then he looked down at the gun in his hand, then at me, a single eyebrow raised.
"Well," he said, his dry tone a stark contrast to the drama of moments before. "That was… something."
A hysterical giggle escaped me. The sheer absurdity of it all—the crying, the designer suit, the wildly inappropriate gift—hit me all at once. "He brought me a gun," I wheezed, leaning into Clyde for support. "He brought me a gun because he can't sleep at night."
Clyde's lips twitched. "It's a nice piece. Terrible idea, but a nice piece." He looked back toward the street where Leo had disappeared. "His heart was in the right place. His brain, however, appears to be on permanent vacation."
I was laughing properly now, the tension bleeding away into pure, unadulterated relief. "Oh my god. I can't believe that just happened."
Clyde tucked the unloaded gun into the back waistband of his jeans—a gesture so casual and yet so inherently Clyde that it set me off laughing again. He pulled me into a proper hug, his body shaking with his own quiet laughter.
"C'mon, you," he said, steering me back inside and locking the door. "Let's get you that tea I promised. I think we've both earned it." He kissed the top of my head. "And for the record? If anyone is going to provide your illegal firearms, it's going to be me. I have better taste."
I looked up at him, at this man who handled crying ex-boyfriends and misguided gifts of weaponry with the same calm competence, and my heart felt so full it might burst.
"Noted," I said, grinning. "I'll be sure to come to you for all my future armament needs."
He grinned back, and for a moment, everything felt perfectly, wonderfully normal. Or at least, our new version of it.
The lingering absurdity of Leo's "gift" had finally faded, replaced by the familiar, focused quiet of my office. Clyde had stashed the unloaded gun in a locked drawer of his go-bag with a shake of his head and a muttered, "Civilians," before settling back into his corner with his laptop. The world outside might have been going mad, but in here, the only things that existed were the hum of the computers, the scent of Clyde's coffee, and the intricate puzzle of the Meridian Fund spread across my screens.
We'd ordered Thai food for dinner, eating at my desk amidst a forest of empty containers and notes. Clyde had devoured his Panang curry with the same focused efficiency he did everything, while I'd picked at my Pad See Ew, my brain already churning through the data.
Hours slipped by. The city lights outside my window twinkled on, one by one. Clyde was a steady presence in my periphery, a silent pillar of strength. He wasn't hovering; he was just there, working on whatever secure, classified things he worked on, his presence a constant, calming hum in the background.
I was deep in the zone, tracing a particularly convoluted series of transfers through a shell corporation based in the Cayman Islands. The numbers were blurring together, a river of digital deceit. I'd hit a wall. Every path I followed seemed to dead-end in a maze of obfuscation and false trails. Frustration was starting to prickle at the edges of my concentration.
I leaned back in my chair with a groan, rubbing my tired eyes. "It's no use," I muttered, mostly to myself. "It's like trying to nail jelly to a wall. They've covered their tracks too well. This shell… it's a ghost. There's nothing here."
Clyde looked up from his screen. "You'll find it," he said, his voice calm with utter certainty. "It's there. You just have to look at it sideways."
"Sideways?" I asked, dropping my hands to look at him.
He shrugged. "Sometimes, when you're staring at a target through a scope, you can look too hard. You miss the wind change, the heat shimmer. You have to unfocus your eyes a little. See the whole picture, not just the bullseye."
Unfocus your eyes. It was such a… Clyde thing to say. A military analogy for forensic accounting. I huffed a tired laugh. "Okay, Yoda. I'll try looking sideways."
I turned back to my screen, but I took his advice. Instead of drilling down into the specific transactions of the shell corporation—let's call it 'Spectre Holdings'—I zoomed out. Way out. I pulled up its entire financial history, not for the last six months, but for the last three years. I looked at its incorporation papers, its annual filing fees, its utility payments for a virtual office. The boring, mundane, administrative detritus that every company leaves behind.
And that's when I saw it.
It was so small, so insignificant, I'd dismissed it a dozen times before. An annual fee for a business license, paid to a municipal office in a tiny, nothing town in Delaware. The amount was peanuts. The payee was the town clerk. But the memo line…
Every other transaction from Spectre Holdings had a blank memo line. Except this one. This one, for a paltry $250, read: 'ANNL LIC RNWL - ACCT # DRGN-SLYR-1'
Dragon Slayer-1.
My breath hitched. My heart gave a hard, single thump against my ribs. It wasn't a callsign. It was a project name. An arrogant, boastful, ridiculously on-the-nose project name.
"Clyde," I said, my voice sounding strange and thin.
He was at my side in an instant, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. "What is it?"
I pointed a trembling finger at the screen. "Look. The memo. 'Dragon Slayer-1'."
He leaned in, his body a solid line of heat behind me. He was silent for a moment, reading the line. "Another project?"
"No," I whispered, excitement beginning to bubble up, fierce and bright. "Not another one. The one. This is it, Clyde. This is the primary holding account. The motherlode. They got sloppy. They got arrogant. They paid a stupid, tiny fee from the wrong account and they couldn't resist giving it a name." A hysterical laugh escaped me. "Dragon Slayer. They thought they were so clever."
Clyde's hand tightened on my shoulder. "What does it mean? Dragon Slayer?"
"It means they saw the U.S. government, the regulations, the entire financial system as the dragon," I said, my mind racing, connecting dots at lightning speed. "And this account, this fund, was their weapon to slay it. To operate above it, outside it. This is the account everything funnels into. This is the heart of the whole operation."
I turned in my chair to look up at him. His face was a mask of fierce, blazing pride. His pale eyes were alight with a fire I now recognized—the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of a locked-on target.
"Troy," he breathed, his voice full of awe. "You brilliant, beautiful man. You did it. You really did it."
He didn't kiss me. He grabbed my face in both his hands and just looked at me, his thumb stroking my cheek, his expression one of such profound admiration that it stole the air from my lungs.
Then a wide, devastating grin spread across his face. "Dragon Slayer-1," he repeated, the words a low growl of triumph. "Well, then." He leaned down, until his forehead was resting against mine, his eyes burning into me. "Time to go slay a dragon."
The air in the office crackled with a new, electric energy. The frustration and fatigue of the last few hours had vanished, burned away by the white-hot thrill of discovery. The cryptic memo line—'DRGN-SLYR-1'—glowed on my screen like a neon sign pointing directly into the abyss.
Clyde's hand was still on my shoulder, a heavy, grounding weight. I could feel the faint tremor of excitement in his grip, a mirror of my own. He straightened up, but his eyes remained locked on the screen, a predator seeing its quarry finally exposed.
"Dragon Slayer-1," he murmured again, the name rolling off his tongue with a mix of contempt and dark amusement. "Arrogant pricks."
"The most arrogant," I agreed, my fingers already flying across the keyboard, pulling up every thread connected to this account. "They got lazy. Complacent. They thought they were untouchable." A vindictive smile touched my lips. "Let's touch them."
For the next hour, we worked in a feverish, synchronized silence. It was a dance we were learning together. I would isolate a transaction, trace its digital fingerprint, and call out a finding. Clyde would then cross-reference it against his own intelligence databases, his secure laptop humming as it chewed through encrypted data.
"Initial seed capital," I announced, highlighting a massive transfer from five years ago. "Fifty million routed through a bank in Luxembourg."
"A bank that was shut down last year for laundering cartel money," Clyde confirmed without looking up. "The CEO 'disappeared' during a fishing trip. Coincidence."
I let out a low whistle. "Charming. Okay, here's a big one. Two hundred million, eighteen months ago. From a holding company called 'Aether'—wait, that's one of ours—to an account in Cyprus."
"Cyprus account is a dead end. Shell within a shell," Clyde said, his fingers flying over his own keyboard. "But the timing lines up with the 'mislaying' of a shipment of advanced missile guidance systems from a U.S. contractor. Systems that later showed up in a conflict zone we're very interested in."
Piece by piece, the horrifying picture came into focus. This wasn't just money laundering. It was a shadow economy funding real-world chaos. Arms deals, political destabilization, black-market tech transfers—it all flowed back to Dragon Slayer-1.
My stomach churned, but it was mixed with a fierce, determined satisfaction. We were doing this. We were unraveling it.
At one point, I leaned back, my spine cracking audibly after being hunched for so long. "God, I need more coffee. My brain is starting to fry."
Clyde was up in an instant. "I'll get it. You stay on the dragon." He headed to the kitchen, and I heard the familiar sounds of the coffee maker grumbling to life.
I stretched my arms over my head, a tired but triumphant smile on my face. I looked around my office—the whiteboards covered in my handwriting, the stacks of files, the two laptops humming side-by-side. It was a war room. Our war room.
He returned with two fresh mugs, handing me one. "Here. Fuel for the final push."
I took it, our fingers brushing. "Thanks." I took a sip. It was perfect, as always. "You know, for a guy who looks like he could bench-press a sedan, you make a mean cup of coffee."
He leaned a hip against my desk, a smirk playing on his lips. "It's a delicate art. Requires precision, focus, and the steady hand of a trained professional."
"I'll bet," I laughed. "Do they teach that in BUD/S? Espresso Extraction Under Pressure?"
"Week six," he deadpanned. "It's where most of the candidates wash out. The latte art round is brutal."
I was still laughing when my eyes caught on something on the screen. A series of smaller, recurring payments from Dragon Slayer-1. They weren't to arms dealers or shadow corporations. They were to a medical research foundation. A highly respected, Nobel-winning one.
"That's weird," I murmured, my smile fading. I clicked on the link, pulling up the foundation's public financial records. "Why is a slush fund for illegal arms dealing funding cutting-edge Alzheimer's research?"
Clyde set his mug down and leaned in, his humor replaced by instant focus. "Maybe it's a front?"
"No," I said, scrolling through the data. "The research is legitimate. Published in all the right journals. It's just… an odd charity case for a bunch of criminal masterminds." I followed the money trail within the foundation's records. The donations were earmarked for a specific project, led by a specific lead researcher.
A name. Dr. Alistair Finch.
I did a quick search. Dr. Finch was a luminary in his field. Seventy years old. A picture of a kindly, silver-haired man with spectacles appeared on the screen. He looked like someone's favorite grandfather.
"Maybe one of the principals has a soft spot?" I mused, puzzled.
Clyde was silent for a long moment, his eyes narrowed in thought. "Or maybe it's not a soft spot," he said slowly, his voice grim. "Maybe it's a vulnerability."
He picked up his secure phone. "Jin. It's Adams. I need a deep dive on a name: Dr. Alistair Finch, neurological research. Cross-reference with any known aliases or connections to our Meridian principals. And I need a wellness check. Is he alive? Is he working voluntarily? Get me everything." He listened for a second. "I don't care if you have to wake the Director again. Do it. Adams out."
He ended the call and looked at me, his expression grave. "These people don't have soft spots, Troy. They have leverage. If they're funding this man's research, it's because they own him. Maybe his work is a cover for something else. Or maybe…" He trailed off, a dark thought shadowing his features.
"Or maybe they have a family member who needs the treatment," I finished, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, sickening certainty. "And they're holding the cure hostage."
The office, which had felt so triumphant moments before, suddenly felt colder. We weren't just following money anymore. We were following lives. We were peeling back the layers of a truly monstrous operation.
Clyde's hand found mine, his grip firm and reassuring. "We'll find him," he said, his voice low and steady. "We'll find them all."
I looked from the kindly face of Dr. Finch on the screen to the determined face of the man beside me. The dragon wasn't just a financial entity. It was a hydra, with heads that reached into the darkest corners of human suffering.
But we had the sword now. And we knew where to strike.