Chaos Owned. Claimed by Sterne, #1.5

Lea Mercer has spent five years building something real. The company is bleeding. The investors are circling. The technology that was supposed to change medicine sits in an unfinished casing on a trade show table, one conversation away from meaning nothing. Sabine Durell is that conversation. She does not offer rescue. She offers terms. What follows is not a simple story of desire, though desire is everywhere in it.
Sabine moves through Lea's professional collapse with the patience of someone who has been waiting for exactly this - and when the company finally falls, she is already holding the door. What she offers on the other side is stillness, structure, and a kind of peace Lea has never been able to build for herself. She is not the only one caught in the machinery. Sofi Valenti works inside it without fully understanding who is pulling the threads - until the moment she does.
By then, the cost has already been paid. Chaos Owned is a sapphic dark romance about predation dressed as rescue, and about what consent means when the conditions around it have been quietly, precisely arranged. The women in this novel are not simple. Neither is what passes between them. Part of the Sterne Universe.