Page 95 of Hate You Most

Elmira Zaitseva had been dragged out from the wreckage. A Russian singer that had moved to the states over a decade ago and had been writing songs blending both Russian and American. Cameras had caught her with both men and women outside a string of clubs, while whispers of her drug addiction trailed close behind.

The images loaded slowly. One after another, each one worse than the last, until the full reality of the crash was laid bare right in front of her. The car was almost unrecognizable, its front crushed inward with such force that it was hard to imagine it had been a fully functioning car just moments before. The windshield had shattered upon impact, and the car had flipped around multiple times in the air before it had finally landed on its side.

Viktoriya’s chest tightened.

She had seen this before. Not just in photographs, but also in the lingering fragments of her mind that surfaced when she thought too hard about the night everything had changed. The violence of it. The suddenness. The absence of anything that resembled control. It had never felt like she'd caused her own crash. And now, looking at this—it didn’t feel like this person had caused theirs either.

She closed the article, but the image remained behind her eyelids. She was certain that if she was asked, she could draw each crash from memory in horrifying detail. Her mind had fixated on it.

For a moment, she simply sat there, her fingers resting lightly against the edge of the laptop. Her thoughts moved slowly, everything remained blurry in her mind. She knew it would make sense at some point, all she had to do was keep going.

She opened a new tab.

And another.

If the official narrative built by the police was going to remain stagnant, then she would build her own.

The process was not immediate, and it was not straightforward, but Viktoriya approached it with the same intensity she had once brought to her training, the same patience that had allowed her to perfect movements that required absolute precision. She began with the obvious details—names, dates, and locations—wrote them down on paper and spread them out in front of her.

Her own crash. Oaklyn Jones, Andrei Korovin & Sebastian Rowe, and most recently Elmira Zaitseva.

There were too many similarities, too many repeated elements that aligned just enough to feel intentional without being identical.

Late at night, with minimal traffic. High-speed impacts with hit and run vehicles. Always people with ties to Russia, with rumors that followed them closely and it always ended with the memory loss.

Viktoriya’s mind lingered on that last detail. It was too specific and too consistent.

If the events themselves were connected, then the people must’ve been as well. That was where things became more difficult.

The victims came from different backgrounds, different industries, different social circles. At first, there appeared to be no direct link beyond their shared nationality and inconsistent relationship rumors, but Viktoriya knew better than to expect something so obvious. Whatever this was, it had been constructed carefully enough to avoid easy detection.

So she looked deeper.

Not at the individuals themselves, but at the systems that surrounded them—the networks that existed behind public life, that helped shape and maintain the images these people presented to the world.

Their management, sponsorships, and public relations.

Hours passed almost unnoticed as the light outside shifted toward the afternoon. Slowly something began to take shape.

A company.

It appeared briefly in connection to one of the victims, listed in a contract that had ended months before the crash. The description was vague and said very little with completely professional and neutral language. It was a company experienced in consulting, branding and strategic image support.

Viktoriya clicked onto it. There was almost nothing there, a website that existed without truly saying anything. Suggested legitimacy without anything to concretely grasp at. No clear leadership, no detailed history, no transparency.

It should have been a dead end, but something about it felt wrong. It lacked the details that real companies accumulated over time.

She searched again and the name reappeared. Red Meridian Consulting.

Viktoriya sat up slightly, her focus sharpening. Red Meridian Consulting. Red Meridian Image Management. Red Meridian Branding Management.

That was no longer a coincidence.

She began following the thread, tracing variations of the company’s name, identifying related entities. A network of different organizations that seemed to exist only briefly before dissolving and reappearing in altered forms. Each one carried a similar language—consulting, branding, management—but none of them provided anything concrete. Almost as if they were all empty shells of different companies. Or of the same company. One word appeared repeatedly.

Red Meridian.

Viktoriya typed it into the search bar on her computer. It was an image management company based in Russia for public figures. That made sense. It was common, expected even, to have someone manage your reputation once you became successful. Careers depended on perception and on maintaining the narratives that aligned with expectations.