Shadow protocol. (Male reader x AESPA)

Y/n is 25, former elite covert operative - tall, sharp-eyed, and dangerously calm in every room he walks into. He retired eighteen months ago after a classified mission went sideways, leaving him with a scar he doesn't talk about and a quiet life in Seoul he's slowly building from scratch. He speaks Korean, English, and enough Japanese to be dangerous. Nobody in Seoul knows who he is - which is exactly how he likes it.
Lee Soo-man - the visionary founder who built SM Entertainment but was forced out of the company he created - still bleeds for the artists he raised. Karina, Winter, Giselle, NingNing. They are, in his words, his greatest work. When an anonymous, wealthy, and increasingly unhinged sasaeng begins a campaign of escalating psychological terror against aespa - hacked devices, leaked rehearsal locations, a handwritten note left inside a locked dressing room - the official security team has no leads. The police are slow. SM's new management is more concerned with optics than safety.
Lee Soo-man calls in his one debt.
Y/n's cover: a newly hired "bodyguard" brought in for their upcoming world tour and for the forseeable future- plausible enough to explain his constant presence around the girls. The four members of aespa know only this. Lee Soo-man and Y/n know everything else.
What neither of them anticipate: four extraordinarily perceptive women who notice that their new "consultant" moves like a predator, reads every room like a blueprint, and never quite answers a question directly. The girls begin to sense something is off - and off is, inconveniently, exactly their type.
The sasaeng, meanwhile, is watching all of this. And he doesn't like what he sees.