Chapter 4 She Knows

MAYA POV

"You’re a sick bastard, Laurent."

My voice echoes off the concrete walls of the tire corridor as I scramble to my feet, ignoring the warning throb in my right knee. I clutch the faded telemetry printout in my fist and shove it straight against the center of his chest.

The solid, warm wall of his pectoral muscle doesn't give an inch beneath the paper.

"Take your garbage back," I hiss, tilting my chin up to glare into those storm-gray eyes. "If you think you can mess with my head by turning me against my own race engineer on day one, you’re even more pathetic than I thought."

Nico doesn't lift a hand to take the sheet. When I let go, it flutters back down, catching on the tied sleeves of his racing suit at his waist.

"Look at the bottom right corner of the page, Maya," Nico says, his voice maddeningly calm. "Before you throw a tantrum and burn the only piece of evidence you’re ever going to get."

"I don't need to look at anything you forged!"

"I don't forge data. I win on the track." He takes a half-step closer, crowding me back against the rubber tire stack until the scent of rain and cedar practically suffocates me. "Two years ago, Evelyn Hart wasn't your chief engineer. She was a junior data analyst assigned to the shared telemetry pool for my team."

"I know where she worked!" My pulse hammers in my throat. "She quit your garage the week after my crash because she couldn't stand looking at you after what you did to me! She slept in a plastic hospital chair next to my bed for three weeks while I had metal screwed into my leg!"

"And six minutes before you hit that wall," Nico continues softly, as if I hadn't spoken at all, "someone at the auxiliary data desk authorized a manual override to my pit wall, flagging your rear tires as critically delaminated.

The digital signature on that override packet is on the bottom of that page."

My gaze drops against my will.

I snatch the paper from his waist and unfold it with trembling fingers. Right below the red abnormality spike on the graph, printed in tiny black courier font, is the routing stamp:

AUTH_ID: EHART_09 // OVERRIDE CONFIRMED.

For a second, the air in the corridor feels too thin to breathe.

"No," I whisper, shaking my head. "No, anyone in that garage could have used an open terminal. You’re twisting this."

"Maybe," Nico says, arching a scarred brow. "Which is why I told you to ask her."

A sharp knock rattles the heavy steel door at the end of the corridor.

"Maya?" Evelyn’s voice calls out from the other side of the metal. "Are you back there? Debrief starts in five!"

My heart leaps into my throat. Without thinking, I fold the telemetry sheet into a tight square and shove it deep into the zippered thigh pocket of my racing suit.

When I look back up, Nico is watching me with a cold, knowing glint in his eyes. If I was so sure he was lying, I wouldn't have hidden the paper. And we both know it.

"We’re not done, Nico," I breathe.

"Trust me, rookie," he murmurs, reaching past my shoulder to flip the deadbolt open. "We haven't even started."

By seven o'clock that evening, the rain has finally cleared over Manhattan, leaving the neon lights of the Lower East Side shimmering across the wet pavement.

I sit in the corner booth of Sammy’s Noodle House, nursing a ginger ale and stretching my freshly wrapped right knee out under the sticky wooden table. Across from me, Evelyn is happily drowning her pork ramen in chili oil, her blonde hair messy after twelve hours in the paddock.

This place has been our sanctuary since we were broke twenty-year-olds splitting a single bowl of broth after karting regionals. Looking at her now—laughing as she steals a dumpling off my plate—my chest loosens for the first time all day.

Nico Laurent is out of his mind. This is Evelyn. The girl who held my hand back when the pain meds made me puke and pawned her grandmother’s watch to help pay for my first private track test after physical therapy.

"You’re awfully quiet tonight, speed demon," Evelyn says, pointing her chopsticks at me. "Still replaying Turn Seven? Because I already told you, the board’s head aerodynamicist practically drooled over your cornering trace during debrief."

"It's not the board," I say, twirling my chopsticks between my fingers. I keep my tone light, almost conversational. "It’s Nico. He cornered me in the tire hallway after our run and tried feeding me the most insane bullshit I’ve ever heard."

Evelyn smiles, rolling her eyes. "Let me guess. He told you that you’re braking too late and ruining your tire life?"

"Worse," I say with a snort. "He tried to claim the crash two years ago wasn't his fault because someone fed him false data that my tires were failing. And then—get this—he actually told me to ask you about it. Like you somehow authorized the override from the junior data desk."

Evelyn freezes mid-bite.

Then she inhales sharply, and the noodle goes straight down her windpipe.

She starts coughing—a violent, choking sound that makes her drop her chopsticks onto the table. Her hand flies to her throat as her face turns bright red, and her elbow knocks her water glass straight across the laminate surface, spilling ice across my lap.

"Whoa, Ev! Hey!" I jump up, grabbing a handful of napkins and patting her back until she manages to drag in a ragged, wheezing breath. "Are you okay?"

"Fine—I'm fine," Evelyn gasps, pressing a napkin to her mouth as tears water in her blue eyes. "God, sorry. Chili oil went straight down the wrong pipe."

"Here, drink mine." I slide my untouched water glass into her hands.

She takes three huge gulps, her chest rising and falling fast, before setting the glass down with a sharp clink. When she looks back at me, she lets out a shaky, high-pitched laugh.

"God, Nico is such a manipulative bastard," Evelyn says, shaking her head as she wipes the table furiously with a wet napkin. "Are you serious? He actually tried to blame me for him driving you into a wall?"

"I told him he was full of shit," I say quickly, guilt pricking my stomach for even keeping that printout in my bag. "Wait—did he have access to the junior terminals back then?"

"Everyone on the senior squad had master passwords to the junior pool, Maya!" Evelyn’s voice pitches up, fierce and defensive. "He’s the reigning champion, and you just got within two-tenths of his lap time on your very first day in the car. Don't you see what he’s doing? He knows I’m the only person in that building who actually has your back, so he’s trying to poison us before the first race!"

"I know," I say, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand. Her fingers are ice-cold against mine. "I swear, Ev, I didn't believe him for a second. Honestly, I think the attitude in his ego is cutting off oxygen to his brain."

Evelyn lets out a breath and smiles, the familiar warmth rushing back into her face as she squeezes my hand back.

"Promise me you’ll throw whatever garbage he gave you in the trash. We can't let him get in our heads this season."

"Wait," I blink, my thumb pausing on her knuckles. "How did you know he gave me something?"

Evelyn’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second.

"You—you said he tried feeding you data," she recovers smoothly, tapping my nose with a grin. "And knowing Nico, the man doesn't go to the bathroom without a printed telemetry chart. Come on, eat your noodles before they get cold. I’m going to wash this chili oil off my hands."

She slides out of the booth and hurries toward the restroom at the back of the restaurant.

I sit back against the vinyl seat, staring at the spilled ice melting across the table. My heart gives a strange, uneasy thud against my ribs. I didn't mention a printout. I only said he tried feeding me bullshit.

Before I can talk myself out of it, Evelyn’s phone buzzes on the table where she left it beside her purse.

The screen lights up in the dim booth with an encrypted server alert from Apex HQ’s internal archive system:

SECURITY WARNING: Legacy Folder [INCIDENT_M7_ARCHIVE] accessed from Terminal 04. Credentials: N_LAURENT.

And right below it, a draft text message Evelyn had

been typing to an unsaved Manhattan number before we sat down: He kept the hard copy. We have a problem