The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 48

The smell of burning rubber and the shriek of tortured metal filled the air. Inside the car, Evelyn was braced against the steering wheel, her heart hammering against her ribs, but her mind was a sea of absolute calm. The initial surge of adrenaline had been replaced by a cold, razor-sharp focus.

While a normal person would have been screaming, paralyzed by fear, Evelyn was already working the problem. The car's primary operating system was compromised. That was a fact. But she had built this car, and she had built it with the assumption that one day, someone would try to do exactly this.

Her hand shot out, not to the main console, but to a small, unmarked panel beneath the dashboard, hidden behind a seamless piece of leather upholstery. She ripped it open, revealing not a mess of wires, but a small, hidden keypad and a single, heavy-duty switch with a red safety cover. It was her own custom-built secondary system, a completely isolated, analog-based manual override. It was the ghost in her own machine.

Her fingers flew across the keypad, typing a complex, sixteen-digit alphanumeric code from memory. A small, green light blinked on. She flipped the red safety cover and slammed the switch down.

With a heavy, satisfying thud, the car's entire electronic brain was severed from its body. The haywire GPS screen went black. The roaring engine coughed and died. The external connection that the attackers had used to seize control was gone. For a single, terrifying second, the car was just a two-ton metal sled, coasting silently on its own momentum, still hurtling towards the bus.

She now had manual control. She stomped on the brake pedal, which was now connected directly to the hydraulic system, bypassing the compromised computer. The brakes engaged with a brutal, shuddering force.

The car screeched, fishtailing wildly as the tires fought for grip on the asphalt. The world outside the window became a terrifying, spinning blur of city lights and the horrified faces of pedestrians. The massive, yellow side of the cross-town bus filled her entire windshield, so close she could see the rivets in its metal panels.

The Koenigsegg finally came to a screeching, violent halt, its front bumper a mere six inches from the side of the bus.

Silence.

A few seconds later, the trace was complete. A digital fingerprint appeared on the screen, a unique signature of the malware that had been used.

Evelyn stared at it, a chill running down her spine that had nothing to do with the near-death experience.

She recognized it.

It was a modified version of a signature she had flagged in her private database years ago. It was from a minor, seemingly insignificant security breach at a high-end maternity hospital in upstate New York. The same hospital where, according to the Thorne family's records, she had been born. The same hospital where all records of her existence before the age of five had been mysteriously and completely erased.