Hacker (CENTURIES series: Book #5) (VERY SLOW UPDATES)

3

• Fair talk, this chapter is mostly explaining a lot of what happened 'behind the scenes' in Genius, as seen from Caleb's side. Not a lot of talking, but if you ever wondered what Caleb was up to during the time Mia and Eli were fucking like rabbits, this is it •

If you had ever hacked into all the things I had and knew all the things I knew, then knowing how Big Brother watched your every move was an understatement.

But now imagine Big Brother had a secret older brother. Or younger. It didn't matter—all you had to imagine was two fucking brothers watching over you, and one was more obsessive than the other. And not in the sexy, kinky way.

– Well, congratulations. You just entered my life.

As if hiding and hunching and working the camera angles all around town like the world's sickest game of hide and seek wasn't bad enough, I had a constant sense of paranoia itching on my back with every move I made. I slept a maximum of two hours at a time unless I'd found a completely secluded place where no one could find me. Even then, I always slept with one eye open.

C.E.N.T.U.R.I.E.S was following me. Or at least that had been their plan. When I wouldn't give Eli up to them, I had deduced they had been left with two choices; one, capture me and hope Eli would come out of hiding to find me, or two, let me go and watch me lead them straight to him. They knew I'd go to my sister eventually. I had to. She was my sister after all, and where my sister was, so was Elijah. So they had went with option two.

– And that was exactly the reason why I hadn't gone back to my sister.

It had taken me a week to shake C.E.N.T.U.R.I.E.S off my back and another one to make sure they weren't bluffing and secretly still tracking me. I still couldn't be completely sure, but I felt about 90 percent confident I had lost them completely by the second week. Still, I took no chances.

Leading them astray had been necessary. If I stayed where they had found me, they could've found Eli through various methods. On the other hand, if I left and kept leading them further away, they would've suspected I was trying to keep them away from something in that part of town. It was a meticulous and well-calculated back-and-forth between four cities; Sometimes I gave them a glimpse of me on a local CCTV camera at a gas station, but other than that, I had gone solid MIA. If they were fucking with us, I was fucking with them. Those were the rules.

But playing the game was taxing.

By the third week of desperately going from one city to another and crying myself to sleep alone in alleyways thinking about my sister, I was getting exhausted. I knew I eventually had to contact Eli somehow and tell him what the deal was, but how? They couldn't catch me with him and he couldn't come looking for me if he saw me from a distance trying to send fucking smoke signals with a blunt or whatnot. It needed to be inconspicuous and in a way only he would catch me and know I was alive and not... taken.

Where the fuck was Liam Nesson when you needed him.

The perfect opportunity presented itself when I one day caught wind of what'd happened after our break-in at the Alexandrettia. I had kept tabs on my boy, knowing now I couldn't bail him out. The strangest fucking thing had then happened, though; after his community sentence got processed, the verdict hadn't made it into the system. At least not digitally.

I had been up for hours waiting for it, but it never appeared. Maybe someone had been lazy and simply filled out the paperwork by hand, stuffing it into some file that would disappear in a filing cabinet in a few weeks, but I didn't know. I couldn't exactly go find out either, which was making my already wound-up body antsy; It was only through street gossip I found out that Eli had been sentenced to 400 hours of community service at the Alexandrettia, cleaning up the mess 'he' had made.