Married to My Stalker

The fluorescent light above Aurel Snow’s desk flickered again, humming like it had something personal against her concentration. She tipped her chin back, watching the bulb stutter weakly before sighing and returning to her open notebook. Her handwriting looked as weary as she felt—thin lines trailing off into smudges where her hand had dragged across the page. The diagrams she sketched from her biology lecture weren’t bad, but they weren’t genius either. She knew that. At Stanton University, a place buzzing with bright minds and big wallets, Aurel was painfully average. Average grades. Average background. Average looks, if you asked her. Her phone buzzed against the wooden desk, startling her. The cracked screen lit up with a notification from her laundry app—the one she had clumsily coded with a classmate to manage her small errand business. New request: Room 207. Two bags. Pick-up tonight. Of course. She set her pen down and rubbed her eyes. The student loan statements pinned to her corkboard didn’t exactly give her much choice. At twenty-three, she had resigned herself to the reality: lectures by day, errands by night. Aurel slipped into her sneakers, pulled her oversized hoodie tighter around her frame, and grabbed the faded tote bag she used for work. The air outside her tiny student apartment was brisk, carrying the bite of an early spring evening in Camden Hill, Massachusetts. The Stanton Apartments weren’t much to look at—four squat buildings lined with peeling paint, sagging balconies, and a constant hum of faulty radiators. Still, it was cheaper than the gleaming dormitories on campus, and she liked the anonymity of being just another tenant. She knocked on Room 207, balancing the tote on her hip. A bleary-eyed sophomore handed over two stuffed laundry bags without a word, his gaze already glued back to his phone. “Thanks,” Aurel murmured, even though he hadn’t said anything to her. Invisible. Always invisible. She carried the heavy bags down the narrow stairwell, the straps cutting into her palms. The laundry room in the basement smelled of detergent and damp socks. Rows of coin-operated machines groaned under the weight of student neglect, half of them out of order. She fed quarters into a working washer and loaded the clothes mechanically. Socks, T-shirts, sweatshirts—items that smelled faintly of dorm room pizza and late-night beer. As the machine rattled to life, Aurel leaned against the chipped wall, pulling her notes back out of her tote. She could study anywhere—cafeterias, buses, laundry rooms. Her life didn’t have space for wasted minutes. The buzzing fluorescent above her head flickered again, and for a moment, she thought she saw movement in the small vent near the ceiling. She squinted, heart skipping a beat. Nothing. Just shadows. She shook herself and bent over her notes again. Maybe too much caffeine was making her jumpy. Her friends—if she could call them that—often teased her for being too cautious. Always locking her door twice, always avoiding parties, always keeping her world small. But Aurel had her reasons. Reasons she never shared. Her childhood had taught her that being visible was dangerous. That trust could break you. That it was safer to study, work, and stay quiet. She never noticed the faint click of a lens adjusting inside her bedroom, hidden deep in the corner behind the curtain rod. She never noticed the encrypted signal transmitting every second of her life to an unseen observer miles away. When the laundry cycle finished, she hauled the damp clothes into a dryer, fed more quarters, and returned to her room an hour later with neat, folded piles. She set them outside Room 207, knocked once, and left before anyone opened the door. Her own apartment was a shoebox—a twin bed, a desk, a kitchenette the size of a closet. The heater clanked so loudly at night she sometimes wore earplugs. She set her notes down and reached for the little saucepan she kept under the sink. Tonight’s dinner: instant noodles with a lone egg cracked in for protein. She stirred quietly, listening to the simmer, letting the steam warm her face. The silence was both comfort and curse. She had grown used to it. By the time she slid into bed, her body heavy with exhaustion, her mind was still turning over biochemical pathways she needed to memorize for tomorrow’s exam. She didn’t see the tiny red light blink from the corner of her room as she drifted into sleep. But somewhere across the city—in a penthouse towering over Camden Hill—a man watched. On his screen, Aurel Snow shifted under her thin blanket, strands of hair falling across her cheek. She was utterly unaware of the gaze fixed on her, of the empire of wealth and power that bent daily to his will, of the obsessive devotion that had made her the center of a universe she didn’t know existed. Zayne Estes leaned back in his leather chair, eyes never leaving the feed. His invisible girl. His secret. And soon, his wife.