Page 1 of Black Ledger

Chapter One

Xeniya Morozova

Age 35

Present

Tormenting a man was truly underrated.

The man in question screamed under my knife, but the sound was muffled by the duct tape over his mouth—because honestly, who really wanted to hear what he had to say?

Aleksandr Volkov squirmed against his restraints to no avail. Trying was pointless because there was no world or universe in which this man could escape me.

He would die, one cut at a time, over days. But first, torture, obviously. It was funnier.

And yes, funnier was absolutely a word.

“I once watched a true-crime documentary about a girl who was kidnapped, raped, tortured for forty days, beaten half to death, set on fire, and stuffed into an oil drum. And do you want to know the worst part, Aleksandr? The murderers got off scot-free.”

The fucking justice system.

“Those men are not on my ledger yet, but they will be. When I am done hunting you and all your vile friends, I will hunt them down and recreate every torment they inflicted on that poor girl.”

One day.

“But for now, I have my list of one hundred and seventy-seven men. My vengeance, my justice…”

Technically, the list was much, much longer.

I just didn’t know every name on it yet. I was held in a small prison cell for three years, and many of my tormentors wore masks and distorted their voices. So I had to uncover their identities. Plus, many of the men on my kill list weren’t involved in my torture directly. They were members of the secret society that kidnapped me, and so, they too deserved to die.

They weren’t absolved because they raped and murdered other women.

One day, I would find them and destroy them all.

For now, my torture subject was Aleksandr Volkov: the former Pakhan of the Russian mafia in New York, father to my ex, and the man who handed me over to the cult like a toy to break, among other horrors.

I crossed to my tool tray and dragged my fingers over the stainless steel blades. The sound rang through the concrete basement, singing a sweet melody of death. I loved tinkering with my instruments and drawing out each moment.

There was something beautiful and a little sick about anticipation.

I affectionately called it my medieval tray because it held all my classic tools. Thumbscrews, for example. Who didn’t love thumbscrews?

“You know…” I picked up a knife and turned back to him, dragging the blade gently along my chin. “Now that I think about it, I should probably stop watching true-crime podcasts. It is probably uncouth for a serial killer to be so obsessed with murder, and yet somehow, it’s comforting. Therapeutic, even. Maybe I am reliving my past trauma and reshaping it... Or perhaps I am getting ideas.”

I sighed dramatically for show. “It’s hard to tell. Because I don’t just want to kill the men on my list. No, I want to haunt them… sometimes for years before I finally end them. I want to torment you, my darling.”

I returned to him and traced the cold edge of the blade along his cheek. “And, oh, how I have tormented you for the past ten years.”

I smiled. Wickedly, of course. Sometimes stereotypes were useful—especially the ones involving truly unhinged psycho killers. “Have you enjoyed it as much as I have? The fear?”

I wrinkled my nose. Mocking. “The panic… wondering when I would strike? What gift I’d leave for you next?”

It was rather uncouth of me to go on and on with a villain monologue, but I found my victims hated the sound of a woman’s voice—especially one with power over them.

I shivered, the cold threading its fingers down my spine. The chamber was concrete and deliberately icy, but my body temperature already ran unnaturally cold. So I shivered constantly. Dramatically. Annoyingly.

Almost like I was a corpse.