Contract Marriage: The Replacement Groom novel Chapter 155

155 Hacking 

Maverick retracted his steps and returned to his sorrowful wife. (1 

Seeing her like this tugs at his heartstring. “It’s just a dream,” he said while pulling her to rest on him. He only wanted her to take it easy but who would have thought that it would make things worse? “No, it’s not,” Jeslyn shook her head as tears gushed out of her red and swollen eyes. “It was too real to be a dream. Maverick,” she looked at him and slowly took his hand then placed it on her chest. “It hurts here,” she said. 

“My heart… hurts, Plum. It feels like… like… I’m dying. My baby, I didn’t see my baby” 

Maverick flattened his lips. He only does that when he is stressed or feeling emotional. 

“I’ll find out what happened. Trust me,” he wiped her tears with his index finger and kissed her on the head before hugging her. (4) 

Jeslyn cried even more before falling asleep in Maverick’s arms again. 

After a while, Maverick laid her to bed before getting up to head to the sitting room. He didn’t stay long knowing Jeslyn might stir awake any moment and if she can’t find him, with that broken state she was in, she might start to panic. 

Maverick returned to the room with a laptop and sat on the bed, making sure to be close enough so Jeslyn would feel that he was there. 

He unblocked his laptop and opened a suspicious–looking app. After a while of accessing its features, a dark–themed blank space popped up and a moment later, a stream of code appeared. Maverick started to type away on his laptop. 

Good thing the keyboard wasn’t making clicking sounds. The longer Maverick stayed on the laptop, the faster his fingers moved. 

Soon his fingers started to blur due to how insanely fast he was going. 

To the general public, CCTV cameras are just a means of protection and they can delete or destroy the images whenever they want to. Unbeknownst to them, every single thing captured on CCTV, no matter how relevant or irrelevant the things are, are being saved by some humans at the top watching every step the people take. 

People might think their lives are safe and they have their privacy all to themselves, but these people controlling the world have nothing like ‘privacy‘ and ‘human rights‘ in their dictionaries. 

Whenever they target someone and want to ruin them, all they need to do is pass out an order for the person to be taken out and before they know it, ‘rumors‘ will suddenly start to spread from ‘nowhere‘ and then, when the person starts to defend themselves, evidence about him is suddenly ‘dug‘ out from the internet to nail the person down. 

Sometimes the people would be wondering where those evidence came from because they rightly destroyed those evidence. 

How would they have known that the organization had its eyes set on all humans? 

12:46 

100 

1/3 

Even though the CCTV footage of that night was ‘intact‘ and didn’t look fishy, now that Maverick had started to doubt the credibility of what he knew back then, he wanted to find the real CCTV footage that might have been deleted. 

However, the more Maverick went deeper into ‘those people’s‘ system, he realized that the particular video he was searching for could not be found. 

Maverick curled his lips. So there has finally been a footage that these people are hiding? 

Arriving at this point, Maverick’s conviction was that there was a conspiracy going on and it has got something to do with Jeslyn, him, and that footage. 

Maverick stopped his search after hitting a dead end. He could detect traps everywhere. It would be bad if he got caught, so he pulled out. There are lots of departments he hasn’t hacked into anyway. The footage must be somewhere in those department. 

Maverick 

birthday?” 

put down his laptop and called Pink. “What do you know about Jeslyn’s eighteenth 

“I know nothing. I was out for work at the time.” 

“Don’t lie to me,” he frowned. 

“I wouldn’t dare. Did something happen?” 

“What happened before your sister died?” He queried again. 

“My sister… She took the fall for me… 

“Before her death,” he cut her off. 

“I don’t know but I heard she died at the hospital she visited for a check–up. What? What’s wrong? Did something happen that I’m not aware of?” 

“Find out,” Maverick said before he ended the call. 

The next morning, Jeslyn appeared to be getting better but Maverick knew she was faking because when he looked into her eyes, there was deep pain and confusion. 

Jeslyn was confused and doesn’t know what she was anymore. Every day, she finds out different things about herself- mostly from weird dreams. 

What’s more off–putting is that they don’t look like dreams. They feel like she has lived them before and was only revisiting or refreshing her mind. 

“Plum, I Miss Valen,” she suddenly said out of nowhere. 

“He’ll be awake soon,” he replied while slicing some onion. 

“His world must be boring him by now. Plum, I’m sure Valen wants to return too.” She said. enthusiastically but Maverick understood that his wife wasn’t alright. She was mentally unwell. 

He put down the knife and pulled her to his chest. “We should return tomorrow. I’ll take you to Valen.” Jeslyn’s eyes lit up in flames of happiness but they dimmed again and her enthusiasm dampened. “You