The Leverage & Lust series

Leverage & Lust

Dark finance romance

“She learned money wasn’t real. Then she stole the machine that prints it.”

A working-class Manchester math prodigy claws her way into the ruthless world of high finance and crypto — trading leverage, revenge, and her body for the edge. Explicit 18+ dark romance.

Dark romance
Billionaire
Anti-heroine
Crypto/finance
Sapphic / F/F
Morally grey

Prelude
EDGE & EXCESS
“Two suitcases and a grudge — and she left with the keys to the machine.”
Lara Voss learned one truth on a cold Manchester floor at seven years old: money is a lie the rich tell to keep you small. She just decided to get very, very good at telling it back.
At Imperial College she has no money, no pedigree, and a chip on her shoulder with its own gravity — but she can read a market the way a predator reads a limp. In London’s underground trading dens she builds code that hunts the desperate and takes everything they’ve got. Then Toby Montgomery walks in: floppy-haired, trust-funded, dangerous in all the wrong ways, and offering her the keys to a Chelsea penthouse and the lawless frontier of crypto.
What follows is high-voltage — the deals, the code, the bodies. But when the market finally breaks, only one of them has the nerve to survive it.
She was never going to be someone’s clever girlfriend. She was always going to own the machine.
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Book One
Confessions of a Crypto Queen
“She read the fear, rode the leverage, and burned the empire down.”
They taught me the market was a casino. So I learned to own the house.
I came out of a damp Manchester terrace with nothing but a genius for numbers and a hunger that scared people. By twenty-two I was the most profitable rogue trader on the City’s deadliest crypto desk — riding hundred-million-dollar positions, snorting printed money off gold-plated tables, and taking whatever I wanted from the beautiful, ruthless men who thought they were using me.
Jax made me. Then Jax tried to bury me.
He should have known better. I don’t panic when the peg snaps and the screen bleeds red. I read the fear. I find the exit. And when a man locks me in a trap, I don’t beg — I liquidate him.
They called it leverage. They called it lust. I called it the only game worth playing.
This is my confession. Raw, unfiltered, and entirely unrepentant.
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Free
Companion to Book One
Conviction & Collateral
“You want to know what conviction actually costs? Not belief. Belief is free.”
November 2021, and he is very, very green. He runs the Bitcoin desk at Vertex Capital — third floor, Mayfair, forty-one screens and a coffee machine that has never once been descaled — and every man who spent four years calling him a religious lunatic has just been past his desk to say they always knew he was early rather than wrong.
The certainty was built in a shared house in Leeds in 2013, on four hundred and twenty pounds he did not have. The price fell eighty per cent in eleven weeks and he did not sell, and the not-selling was never courage — he simply had no plan for being wrong. It came back. That is the whole disease: the first time the market paid him for being paralysed, he stopped being able to tell paralysis from conviction.
A free companion to Confessions of a Crypto Queen, set on the third floor at Vertex while Lara was taking the prop desks apart one floor away — and never knew they were there.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
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Free
Companion to Book One
Circuit Breaker
“You want to know who actually decides whether you get your money out?”
Not the founder — he is on a stage in Lisbon. It is Meilin Chua, on the fourth floor of an office block in Singapore, with a laptop and a red button that isn’t red and isn’t a button.
She runs site reliability for Titan: nine hundred staff, eleven million accounts, and one matching engine in a rack in Tai Seng she can reach in nineteen minutes on a normal day, and once reached in eleven. Her job is one sentence long — the system stays up. The other half of it, the half nobody wrote down, is that when the system cannot stay up she is the person who turns it off, deliberately, before it falls over on its own. A system you switch off comes back. A system that falls over under load comes back with its ledger in pieces.
A free companion to Confessions of a Crypto Queen. The forty-minute halt hit desks in eleven countries — one of them a prop desk in Mayfair, run by a woman who had assumed she could always hedge her spot risk.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
Read it free, here
Interlude
Read & Ruin
“Her name was Lara Voss — and she was the first person I could never read.”
You want to know what I actually do for a living?
The clean version says analyst. The true version is shorter: I make a man believe that wanting me was his own clever idea — and then I take the one thing I came into the room to take. He never feels the hand in his pocket. Most of them thank me for the evening.
I learned to read faces before I could spell, in a flat in Ilford where the weather turned without warning and getting it wrong cost more than I could pay. By twenty-six I could walk into any room in the City and leave with whatever I’d decided at the door to take.
Then the coins came for my mother. A safe one, they told her. A digital pound that could never fall. Forty billion went into the drain in a single week — and somewhere in a glass tower, one woman had seen it coming, and made a fortune on the way down.
So I built myself into a weapon and rode a lift forty floors up to meet her.
Her name was Lara Voss. And she was the first person I have never, in my whole life, been able to read.
Read & Ruin is the origin of Mara Chen — the prequel to Confessions of a Hedge Fund Mistress.
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Book Two
Confessions of a Hedge Fund Mistress
“She should have been my mentor. She became my obsession.”
She should have been my mentor. She became my obsession — and I was never only here to learn.
They call Lara Voss the most dangerous woman in London.
I talked my way onto her hedge-fund floor with a gift her quants don’t have — I read people the way she reads markets — and a reason of my own I keep buried so deep I can almost pretend it isn’t there.
She was supposed to be the woman who made me. I didn’t plan on wanting her hands on me every time she leaned over my desk. I didn’t plan on any of the things I let happen after dark, in the glass office above a city full of money.
Now the market is climbing toward something that can’t hold, the coldest, sharpest woman I’ve ever met is teaching me everything she knows, and every night I let her closer, I get further from the thing I actually came here to do.
She thinks she’s shaping me.
She hasn’t realised yet that a mirror doesn’t just reflect. It replaces.
When it all breaks — and it will — only one of us walks off that floor on top.
She taught me too well to let it be her.
F/F. Forbidden. The scandalous, sharp-clawed sequel to Confessions of a Crypto Queen.
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Free
Companion to Book Two
Fair Value
“You want to know what a thing is worth? Ask what somebody just paid for one.”
That answer is available for about four per cent of what sits on a hedge fund’s books on any given morning. For the other ninety-six per cent there is no answer at all, so somebody makes one up — legally, with standards and a hierarchy and an audit trail and a signature at the bottom, an entire apparatus for converting a number a man invented at his desk into a number a pension scheme in Rotherham can rely on.
Callum was that man at Rogue Capital for two years and eleven months. Saoirse Quinn was the signature. They had never met: on the second working day of every month he joined a call she was always already on, and she said “Morning, Callum,” and then “Position one,” and they went through his book for anywhere between forty minutes and two hours. Fourteen of those calls before anything happened.
A free companion to Confessions of a Hedge Fund Mistress.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book Two
Short Interest
“I found people who were going to have to sell.”
Not people who wanted to sell. People who were going to have to, on a date, at a price they would not choose, because something in their structure had already decided it for them and they had not yet worked out that the decision was made. Then she got there first.
The job has a respectable name — special situations — and a corner office at Kestrel Partners in St James’s. There were four of them doing it and she was the best one. A hedge fund is a promise with a lock on it: investors give notice quarterly, the fund holds things it cannot sell in a hurry, and that mismatch is the entire business model. It is also a fault line running under every fund in London, and most of the time nothing happens.
A free companion to Confessions of a Hedge Fund Mistress. Nell was outside the building, and she was correct, and she was late.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
Read it free, here
Interlude
Realized Loss
“Everyone thinks they know how a villain is made.”
Let me tell you the truth, since you’re going to need it before you meet me in the tower.
I found her first. A junior nobody at a desk that didn’t deserve her, and I taught her everything — how to read a room, how to price a silence, how to ruin a man and walk away clean. I gave her the knife. I told her where the soft places were. I called it love, and for one year it was, and it was the best year I’ll ever have.
Then she used every piece of it against me. Leaked the logs. Cleared her own accounts. Left mine in the fire and let me believe, for four seconds in a locked room at an airport, that there was still something real between us — right up until she told me there wasn’t.
She realized the loss. Made it permanent. Made me permanent.
So I stopped being a man you could read. I became something colder, and quieter, and much harder to kill — and now I hold the paper on everything she’s built, and she doesn’t know it yet.
She thinks the story ended at that airport. She has no idea it was only the opening trade.
Realized Loss is the free prequel to Confessions of a Counterparty (Leverage & Lust, Book 3) — the villain’s origin, told by the villain himself. Fall for him. You’ll regret it.
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Book Three
Confessions of a Counterparty
“He wants to close the position. We’re going to make him regret opening it.”
I ruined a man once. I did it cleanly, on purpose, and I walked away without looking back.
He didn’t stay ruined.
Now Jaxon Sterling is back — no face, no fingerprints, thirty-one people running a machine built for one purpose: to erase me and everything I’ve built. He holds the paper on my life. He owns the debt on hers. And he’s patient in a way only a man who’s already lost everything can be.
Her. That’s the part he didn’t price. The woman standing next to me at the top of his burning tower. The one who did to me what I did to him — read me, wanted me, chose survival over me — and somehow ended up mine anyway. We shouldn’t trust each other. We definitely shouldn’t love each other. Two women who ruin people for a living don’t get soft endings.
But Jax is coming for both of us, and the only way out is a trade so ruthless it’ll cost us the last human thing either of us has left.
He wants to close the position.
We’re going to make him regret opening it.
Confessions of a Counterparty is the explosive third book in the Leverage & Lust series — a dark, twisty, scorching-hot romance thriller of betrayal, obsession, and two dangerous women against the man who made them both. Standalone romance arc; richest read after Books 1 & 2.
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Free
Companion to Book Three
Finder’s Fee
“You want to know what a loss looks like when it belongs to a country? It looks like a document.”
Not a screen with red on it. By the time it reaches Yara Haddad it has been through eleven weeks and four committees, and it arrives as a request for a paper: thirty pages, appendices permitted, addressed to the investment oversight board, with a nine-digit figure on page four that used to be a hospital.
She is twenty-nine, a senior analyst at a sovereign wealth fund on the Gulf — a phrase people find glamorous, and which means an office block, a canteen, and four hundred people managing what a country earns from the ground on behalf of whoever is alive when it runs out. That last part is not rhetoric. It is on the wall in the lobby, in two languages. The Rogue Capital position was three hundred and ten million dollars. By the time it reached her it was worth a little under nine.
A free companion to Confessions of a Counterparty.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
Read it free, here
Free
Companion to Book Three
Terminal Value
“Two things, and everybody only ever remembers one of them.”
The first was that she made hard things understandable — read the papers, stood on stages, and said what they meant in words a man with a chequebook could hold in his head for the length of a lunch. A legitimate profession, and one that has existed since somebody first explained a canal to a duke.
The second was that she sat on a credit committee. Nobody puts that in the articles; there is no footage of eleven people round a table on the fourth floor of a lender on Bishopsgate, going through facility requests line by line and deciding who in that sector got to borrow and against what. She did it for six years and was good at it for five. Put the two together and you have the thing she actually was: the person who told the street what the machines were going to do, and then signed the paper that let the street borrow against it.
A free companion to Confessions of a Counterparty. Carrie gave the introduction in January and thought it cost her nothing.
Heat note: sexual content, handled off the page. In her own words: “the companion stories close the door. The novels do not.”
Read it free, here