Possessive Stepdad's Stalker Breeding Obsession (Possessive Stepfather #10)

1. Mark

MARK

I don't fidget. I don't shift in my seat. I don't do anything that broadcasts what's happening inside my chest right now, because I've built a career — a damn empire — on reading people who can't control what their bodies give away.

So I sit in my car, engine off, hands on the wheel, and I watch her window on the fifth floor like I've done every night this week.

The light's on. She's home.

But she's not following her routine.

Eight-fifteen on a Tuesday night, she should be at her kitchen table with her laptop open, picking at whatever she managed to buy at the grocery store with the forty-three dollars she counted out at the register yesterday.

Instead, she's on her couch. Has been for twenty minutes.

Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around herself, not moving.

The feed shows me everything — high-definition, full-color, Blackwall Systems hardware because I don't cut corners on surveillance architecture — but it doesn't tell me what happened today that broke her pattern.

The tablet propped on my dashboard displays four camera angles of her studio apartment. Military-grade optics, motion sensors, audio pickup so sensitive I can hear her neighbor's television through the thin walls.

Crystal clear footage installed by the man who designed it. Me. The cameras would tell me she's home from across the city, but I'm not across the city. I'm parked forty feet from her front door like a man who's lost his mind, and the worst part isn't that I know it.

The worst part is I don't care.

August heat radiates off the pavement even at night, Boston summer thick and sticky. Her building squats across the street — old brick, five stories, the kind of construction that should have been condemned before she was born.

No doorman, no security cameras except mine, no working intercom.

The front entrance stays propped open with a brick because the lock mechanism gave up. I know this because I've walked through that door. I've climbed those stairs. I've stood outside her apartment and catalogued every way this building fails to protect her.

My hands tighten on the steering wheel. The leather is warm, slick with humidity.

At six-six, I don't fit comfortably in any car for extended periods — my knees press against the dashboard, my shoulders crowd the space — but I've sat here every night, watching her window, memorizing the rhythm of her life through a screen.

Something is wrong tonight. She missed her eight o'clock pump session. Skipped dinner. Hasn't touched her phone in over an hour, which never happens. College students live on their phones like life support, but hers sits dark on the coffee table while she stares at nothing.

The wrongness pulls at me, drags my thoughts backward to six months ago when I thought I knew what wrong looked like.

Six months ago, I divorced Rayna Sinclair.

The marriage lasted eight months — a mistake from the start, but a calculated one.

Rayna needed financial security. I needed a wife for certain business dealings where being married opened doors that being single kept closed.

Transactional. Clean. No romantic illusions on either side, which made the end easier when it came.

What I didn't expect was the phone call from my accountant three days after the papers were signed.

"Mark, we've got a problem."

I was in my office, reviewing quarterly reports, when Marcus called.

The number on the screen made my jaw clench — one million, four hundred thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six dollars.

Gone. Transferred out of an account only Rayna had access to, moved through three shell companies, and vanished like it never existed.

My ex-wife had robbed me.

Not for the money — a million dollars is pocket change when you're worth nine figures. But for the principle. The man who builds security systems for Fortune 500 companies, who protects other people's assets like they're sacred, got taken by his own wife.

The irony wasn't lost on me. Neither was the insult.

I deployed every resource I had to find her. Called in favors from contacts who don't advertise their services, used facial recognition software that shouldn't exist, tracked financial footprints through networks that would make the FBI jealous.

For weeks, I followed digital breadcrumbs that led nowhere. Rayna Sinclair had vanished as completely as if she'd never existed.

That's when I remembered her daughter.

If I couldn't find the mother, I could find leverage through the child.

Maura Sinclair, twenty-one years old. Rayna's daughter from before she ever met me — no shared blood, no legal connection beyond the eight months I was married to her mother.

I'd met Maura once, at the wedding. Brief handshake, polite small talk, then she spent the reception on the edges.

Dark hair, quiet voice, completely forgettable.

I expected to find her living comfortably on her mother's stolen money. Maybe in contact with Rayna, maybe not, but definitely benefiting from the theft. A pressure point I could use to draw the mother out of hiding.

What I found instead made me want to burn something down.

The address led me to a neighborhood where car alarms go off like clockwork and the streetlights stay broken.

Fifth-floor walk-up, no elevator. I walked through the front entrance without using my lock picks because the door doesn't close properly — the strike plate is held on with two screws instead of four, and the wood around it is rotted soft.

Five flights of stairs in a stairwell that smells like old carpet. Fluorescent lights with half the bulbs burned out. A fire extinguisher that expired in 2019. Paint peeling off the walls in sheets.

Each floor worse than the last, my professional instincts cataloguing every failure point, every code violation, every way this building would trap someone if they needed to get out fast.

Her door sits at the end of a hallway barely wide enough for my shoulders.

The lock is a joke — a standard residential deadbolt with a strike plate hanging loose, gaps around the frame wide enough to slip a credit card through.

I could have opened it with a paperclip.

Hell, I could have opened it by leaning on it wrong.

Rayna stole a million dollars and left her daughter in a building where any drunk with persistence could walk into her apartment.

That's when I decided to install the cameras.

I waited until she left for campus the next morning.

Harmon University, English Literature major, Tuesday-Thursday schedule that I memorized from following her for three days.

Watching her walk to class — five-four in thrift store clothes, backpack held together with duct tape, moving through the world like someone who takes up as little space as possible.

The lock took me thirty seconds to defeat. The apartment itself stopped me cold.

Studio layout, maybe four hundred square feet total. Secondhand furniture that looked like she'd rescued it from curbs — a couch with a blanket thrown over it to hide the worn spots, a table that doubled as her desk, a bed pushed against the wall.

Clean, because she kept it that way, but nothing in it was worth more than fifty dollars. The refrigerator held condiments and leftovers. The bathroom had generic toiletries and towels that had been white once.

This is where Rayna's daughter lives while her mother sits on stolen money somewhere.

Installing the surveillance system took me four hours. Four cameras, positioned for complete coverage — one in the main room's upper corner, one above the kitchen area, one covering the bed, one in the bathroom.

Blackwall Systems hardware, the same grade I install for government contracts. Invisible to anyone who doesn't know what to look for, broadcasting to encrypted servers I control.

The best surveillance technology money can buy, deployed to watch my stepdaughter in a studio apartment.

I noted it once and moved on.

The cameras were supposed to monitor for Rayna. If she called, visited, sent money, made contact in any way, I'd know. I'd have my leverage.

That lasted exactly one day.

By the second evening of watching the feed, I hadn't thought about Rayna once. I was watching Maura.

Three specific moments over the past month have rewired my brain.

The first happened a week in. I was in my office, the feed running on a secondary monitor while I reviewed contracts, when she started talking to herself while cooking.

Not muttering — full conversation, complete with different voices for the participants.

She was making scrambled eggs, and the eggs weren't cooperating.

"Okay, we're going to try this again," she said to the pan, serious as a boardroom negotiation. "And this time, you're not going to stick to the bottom like you have personal issues with me."

The eggs stuck anyway.

"Really?" She stared into the pan, hands on her hips. "I'm trying to have a civilized relationship here, and you're going to be petty? Fine. We'll do this the hard way."

She scraped the eggs off the bottom with a fork, salvaged what she could, and ate them standing over the sink. Then she looked directly at the pan and said, "This isn't over."

I laughed. Sitting alone in my office watching a surveillance feed, and I actually laughed. A man who hasn't found anything funny in years, undone by a woman arguing with breakfast.

The second moment came two weeks later. Her laptop died while she was working on an assignment — battery drained, charger cord frayed where it connects to the adapter.

She sat there staring at the dark screen for thirty seconds, then got up and disappeared into the bathroom. Came back with nail polish — clear coat — and painted it over the frayed section of the cord.

MacGyvered a laptop charger with drugstore nail polish.

It worked. The laptop powered up, and she went back to typing like she'd just performed routine maintenance instead of a minor miracle. Problem identified, solution improvised, execution flawless.