Page 36 of Black Ledger

I could be anything I wanted, which was why I started going by Sienna—mostly because my college professors and classmates struggled with the very Russian spelling of Xeniya, which had a K in it and was technically my legal name.

So I put them all out of their misery and told them to call me Sienna.

It was close enough and very much not Russian.

“Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me.” My sister’s voice stormed from the very high-end fitting room.

Shock cracked through the client advisor’s composed professional mask, judgment following close behind—but she buried it just as quickly, replacing it with a careful smile when her eyes met mine.

The Morozov name was well known, even here in Chicago. It meant something, and our black cards meant more, and our reputation for violence mattered the most.

My gaze flicked away from the advisor to my childhood friend, Ekaterina Kaloshin. She was a closer friend to my sister than she had ever been to me, but she came with me to college anyway.

Her brother came, too—Kazimir, my best friend aside from Severin.

Katya sighed. “What is it now, Nika?”

“I just got my fucking period. I know it happens every month, but it’s still annoying… and it always surprises me.”

Nika was always dramatic. It was chiseled into her bones. So this wasn’t surprising, and I’d heard this many times before.

Nika had ADHD. If something wasn’t important or exciting, it simply didn’t exist to her, like her period. Tracking it wasn’t important to her, so she didn’t put the systems in place to remember.

I, on the other hand, tracked mine like it was a job. I was terrified of teenage pregnancy and ruining my future.

Not that I was fucking.

I was still very much a virgin, but I was determined to fix that this year. The only problem was that the one person I’d ever wanted was across the country in New York City.

“Do you want a tampon or a pad?” I asked, rifling through my purse.

I always kept both in my purse. Tampons were very effective at staunching bullet wounds, and my friends were not very responsible, so I kept the pads for them.

“A Super Plus tampon, please,” Nika called, and I walked behind the curtain and handed her just that.

“Oh, and take this.” Nika held out her bloody thong.

I shook my head, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it into my bag.

“Do you have an extra pair of underwear?”

“Yeah, I just keep them in my purse,” I said dryly.

“Oh, good.”

“She was joking, Nika,” Katya said, pushing open the curtain, too.

“Oh…”

“I found some,” Abigail, my freshman-year roommate, said, running into the dressing room with a pair of expensive but not overly lacy underwear. “I started looking as soon as she yelled.”

I laughed. Abigail was always a problem solver.

It was why I liked her and why I let her convince all of us to rush sororities during my second year at the University of Chicago. Nika was instantly sold. It took me longer to warm up to the idea. But I was reinventing myself… so why not?

I was a normal college student. Now if only I could take to my friends’ lessons on makeup and fashion just as fast.

After Nika’s dramatic outburst, we spent seven hours—seven—shopping. We bought ourselves entirely new wardrobes. Mine leaned heavily into blood-red and a winter palette. But Nika and Abigail convinced me to buy some softer blues, too, and greens that matched my eyes.