Page 86 of Hate You Most

Connected. The word echoed loudly in her mind.

She closed the laptop completely and shoved it away from her to the foot of the bed. Her gaze drifted toward the window, where the city lights glittered across the dark skyline.

She tried to convince herself that she was overthinking it. Two accidents did not automatically mean something sinister had happened, or that they were connected in any way. But the uneasy feeling refused to leave her, because deep down, Viktoriya knew with absolute certainty that something about her crash didn't make sense.

And now—seeing another crash so eerily similar to her own—she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It didn’t feel like a coincidence anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY

January 7th, 2023.

— Hotel St. Regis, Detroit, Michigan.

The next three days passed in a strange foggy limbo.

Viktoriya was skating every day and talking to the girls from the team, but the moment she walked back to the hotel and the door closed behind her, the car crashes were the only thing on her mind.

She had tried to occupy herself with other things, but her thoughts wandered in circles. She was going crazy. She couldn't stop thinking about it.

Viktoriya sat on the edge of the hotel bed, her laptop open beside her. The glow from the screen washed a pale light across the room, illuminating a mess of notes, printed screenshots, and news articles spread across the comforter. They were fragmented puzzle pieces and all she had to do was connect them.

There had been two other crashes that she'd been completely unaware of due to being cut off from technology for months. Three crashes in total.

Three days ago she'd told herself that the crashes had been completely random. A tragedy, yes, but also a coincidence. The roads were dangerous in the dark, especially in the pouring rain. People made mistakes and cars malfunctioned. And then she'd learned about the third second crash. And about the Third.

Viktoriya stared at the printed articles lying across the comforter, she took one and held it against the light from the window.

The crash in November had been so violent that the woman had barely been alive when she'd been found and pulled out of the wreckage. She had fallen into a coma just like Viktoriya had. The woman's legs were broken in four different places from bending with the front of the car as it had flipped twice over.

The woman was Oaklyn Jones, a Russian-born actress who had changed her name after moving to the United States seven years earlier. Gossip columns in magazines occasionally wrote about her supposed relationships with women, once they even printed grainy photographs of her supposedly kissing a woman outside of a night club.

The crash a month later, in December, had involved Andrei Korovin and Sebastian Rowe, whose private lives had been the subject of quiet speculation for years. Viktoriya found out through almost stalkerish behavior of different gossip magazines that the two actors lived just four houses apart and had formed a close friendship after co-staring together in a movie in 2004. Only one of the actors was Russian, but they'd both been completely wrecked by the crash. According to different articles, they had both suffered memory loss and it was currently unknown if they'd make a full recovery.

There wasn't much else known about the different crashes, and the police had been quick to dismiss each case as unrelated to the next. Another story that had been buried within days.

She rubbed her temples. No, not buried. Erased.

Her phone sat beside her notebook. The contact she had been staring at for nearly twenty minutes glowed faintly on the screen.

Oaklyn Jones.

She had found her phone number buried deep in an article about different celebrities, after hours of digging through different magazines. The articles had barely mentioned her, and what they did describe was only how attractive she was compared to other actresses of the same year.

Oaklyn had survived the crash, and maybe she'd seen or remembered something. Maybe she was the missing link to all of this.

Viktoriya exhaled slowly and picked up the phone. Her thumb hovered over the call button. She wasn't even sure the number was correct, she could very well be calling someone else. If she was wrong, she would sound insane, but if she was right—the thought sent a cold shiver down her spine. She pressed call and the dial tone hummed softly in her ear.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

She almost hung up. Then the line clicked.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end was rough and cautious.

Viktoriya stood up and moved toward the window.