Page 110 of Hate You Most

Instead of lingering, her gaze shifted from Dakota to the ceiling, toward the soft patterns of light that stretched across it. For a few moments, that was enough.

She listened to the steady rhythm of Dakota’s snoring and to the faint sounds of the city beyond their walls. It was the closest to calm she could get.

Then, without warning, her father’s voice was inside her head. A harrowing echo. It was impossible to ignore. His words had waited for her, for the exact moment she was awake enough to fully process it.

We had an agreement.

The words did not belong in the room, did not belong in her mind, and yet they wouldn't leave. The words swirled in the back of her mind, on loop.

Her expression shifted slightly in the darkness. She didn't recall agreeing to anything. That alone was not unusual, considering how much of her mind she still couldn't access. Though it felt different, and that unsettled her more than the absence of the memory itself. Something had been decided without her, or by a version of herself that she no longer recognized, and now she was expected to agree without fully understanding it.

Her fingers curled slightly against the sheets before she pushed herself upright. She moved carefully so as not to disturb Dakota.

The air turned colder the further she stepped away from the bed, enough to wake her mind fully as she crossed the room.

Her attention shifted to the one thing that lingered at the edges of her thoughts. The accidents.

It had never truly left her. No matter how many times she had tried to accept it as something finished, something explained, something that belonged in the past rather than the present.

She couldn't keep ignoring it. The police had no interest in seeing the separate crashes as connected and didn't care that all the victims were from the same country.

She moved down the stairs and didn't even have to look for her laptop. It sat closed where she had left it the night before, on the oak table.

Viktoriya paused for a brief moment, her hand hovering above it, and then she lifted the screen.

A blue glow cut through the dimness of the room, bright enough she had to force her eyes to adjust. Her focus sharpened further as she navigated through files and documents she had already saved and studied. It was a failing attempt to reconstruct something that no longer existed in her own mind. The truth.

She quickly found the articles that mentioned the police reports, and it was exactly as she remembered. Every detail was presented in a way that suggested it was nothing but completely separate car crashes.

She read through them again, slower this time, her attention not on the narrative itself but on the framework that surrounded it, the parts she had previously overlooked because they had not seemed relevant.

The names and signatures and the different departments.

Everything aligned with what she'd already read a million times over. Though one name still kept showing up. Red Meridian Consulting.

It caught just enough of her attention that she couldn't move past it in the same way she'd done before. Someone had caused these crashes and made these celebrities forget something important—and she needed to find out who.

She opened another document, then another, and cross-referenced them. She allowed her gut feeling to guide her.

The same name appeared again. Red Meridian Consulting, Red Meridian Image management. Red Meridian Branding management.

Shells of the same company.

Her focus sharpened further. She pulled up additional files, scanned for patterns rather than for the isolated details. Multiple names appeared. Different companies with different positions, but they all shared the same name.

Red Meridian was only mentioned a handful of times in the reports and had nothing to do with the crashes itself. It was listed as a consulting firm and specialized in public relations and image stabilization for high-profile Russian figures—athletes, actors, influencers. Anyone whose public perception carried measurable value—and on the surface, everything about it seemed clean and entirely legitimate. They offered reputation management, media training, crisis responses, and long-term branding strategies designed to maintain consistency and control across both domestic and international platforms.

But the deeper she looked, the less it resembled a simple consulting firm.

Their involvement was rarely direct and almost never central, and yet their name appeared in these reports.

They had shifted the narratives on different celebrities. Scandals that should have gotten them cancelled had dissolved before gaining any traction at all. Individuals had re-emerged with altered public images that aligned too neatly with what the nation had expected of them. If they went off course, and rumors started, that too, was corrected. Behind the scenes Red Meridian had quietly corrected the course of their lives so they could remain with a good reputation.

Red Meridian reshaped celebrities and erased the parts of them that didn't fit their narrow view of acceptance. And in some cases, Viktoriya realized that they didn't just manage what these people said outwardly—they managed what was allowed to exist at all.

She took a hard breath in.

She'd heard that name somewhere before, Red Meridian. Not from researching about the accidents, but from hushed conversations in her childhood bedroom. Behind closed doors.