The The Blood Ledger series
The Blood Ledger
Filipino aswang dark romance
“A Visayan bloodline that feeds on people, and keeps the accounts in a ledger older than the country’s laws.”
Filipino aswang folklore inside a Makati office tower and a 1987 Davao compound: a dynasty that eats, the women who marry into it, and the ledger that recorded their names before they were ever asked. A complete trilogy of explicit 18+ novels, plus companion novellas whose slow burn is held unconsummated, with no sexual content on the page.
Prelude
What the Ilustres Eat
“She married a kind man from a wealthy family. It took her three months to learn what the family eats.”
Find it on AmazonDavao, 1987. Consuelo is twenty-three, a schoolteacher from a Cavite town where her mother took in laundry, and the Ilustre compound is the most beautiful place she has ever been allowed to stand in. Her husband is gentle with her. Her mother-in-law sets her a place at the head table. The house has one room she is asked very politely not to enter.
She notices things in order. That the workers who walk into the treeline at dusk do not always walk back out. That her husband’s hands are cold in a province that has never once been cold. That there is a ledger in the house holding the name of every woman who has married an Ilustre — and that hers was entered three weeks before she met him.
By the time she understands what she has married into, leaving is still possible. The family is courteous about refusals. There have been three.
Consuelo does not leave. She reads the ledger, and then she starts keeping her own.
A complete standalone novella, thirty years before Blood and Bone City, and the doorway to The Blood Ledger.
Book One
Blood and Bone City
“She took the job to pay for her mother’s dialysis. Nobody told her what the family eats.”
Find it on AmazonMarisol Reyes is twenty-two, from Imus, and the most competent person in every room she is allowed into. When Ilustre Capital hires her on the spot as executive assistant to its chief executive, she runs the numbers the way she runs all numbers: the salary covers her mother’s treatments, the fare, the debt, with something left over. She does not ask why the job seemed to be waiting for her.
Alejandro Ilustre is thirty-four, old Davao money, and careful in a way that reads as control until she notices it is concealment. He remembers everything she says. He corrects her salary before she asks. He never eats in front of her.
By the time she understands what he is, she has already fallen, already stayed, and is already carrying his child.
The Ilustres are aswang. What moves in Alejandro’s blood is moving now in hers. The child will inherit either way — the only thing still open is who gets to decide.
Book One of The Blood Ledger. Slow burn to explicit, with consent legible even when the power is not equal.
Interlude
The Taste of What Is Owed
“She was hired for her competence. She was acquired for it.”
Find it on AmazonMakati, the forty-third floor. Marisol Reyes is twenty-two, from Imus, and six weeks into a job that seemed to be waiting for her. The salary covers her mother’s dialysis at four thousand eight hundred and forty pesos a session, three sessions a week, with something left over. She has run that arithmetic more times than she will admit. She has not yet run the arithmetic on why the job was there at all.
Alejandro Ilustre tells her nothing and remembers everything. In the car he explains her role in fourteen words: a resource, not a participant. She notes the fourteen words. She notes the pause before resource. She counts the eleven feet from her desk to Shelf B, memorises the cleaning schedule because it tells her when the floor is unobserved, and reads a room the way she reads a balance sheet — for the entry that is missing rather than the ones that are there.
Then he hands her a folder for the Davao sub-registry, shelf 4-C, before you go. It weighs about forty grams more than a folder that size should. Inside: a requisition with an eleven-day gap in it, a clause that gap makes possible, and a note in his handwriting bridging the two with a single figure.
She does not confront him. She does not take it to anyone. She files the folder exactly where it belongs, pages in the order she found them, and then she buys a green accountant’s book and opens the first column. You cannot audit an account you have walked away from.
The six weeks before Blood and Bone City, from inside her head — and the origin of the ledger the trilogy is named for. A complete standalone. Read it after Book One, then carry on into Marrow and Manila.
Heat note: no sexual content on the page in this novella. The slow burn is held at the tension and nothing is consummated. The novels in this series are explicit and 18+.
Book Two
Marrow and Manila
“She kept a ledger of every figure her husband withheld. This is the book where she presents the account.”
Find it on AmazonMarisol Reyes Ilustre is eight weeks postpartum, married into the family that made her, and no longer the woman they hired. The fever changed what she can smell, what she can hear, and what she is willing to let pass without pricing it.
Then a schedule arrives from Davao with her daughter’s name on it. Isadora’s inheritance is not settled. It is subject to verification of what her mother has become.
Alejandro knew what the transmission would cost her before she signed. He held the Davao letter for six days before she saw it. He still sets her coffee down at exactly the temperature she would have asked for, and she has stopped mistaking that for an apology.
So Marisol does the one thing she has always been good at. She writes her own classification, files it with the Davao patriarchs, and begins auditing the family that owns her: the cousin who wants her daughter’s claim, the woman who has run these rooms since before Marisol was born, and the stranger who arranged for her to be hired three years before there was a Marisol to hire.
Forty-one days to prove what she is. Seventy-two hours to claim what that makes her. And a husband who has to decide whether he can stay married to a woman who reads him the way he taught her to read a balance sheet.
Book Two of The Blood Ledger. Married dark romance, renegotiated in the open and never absolved, with a morally grey husband who is not redeemed into safety. Start with Blood and Bone City; the trilogy closes with Salt and Succession.
Interlude
Yield
“Marisol Reyes thought she was learning the family. There is a file that says otherwise, and it was opened before her first day.”
Find it on AmazonThe forty-third floor of Ilustre Capital runs at nineteen degrees. The building’s default is twenty-two. Someone set it by hand, which makes it a preference encoded as infrastructure, and Marisol files it on day two along with everything else: the gap in the floor plan she was given, the archive room on the forty-second floor that appears on no plan at all, the eight-second interval where a client always asks about Q2.
She is twenty-two, from Imus, and the salary is sixty-two thousand a month, which is what her mother’s dialysis costs plus the fare plus the debt. Eleven Thursdays at the centre so far. The nurse is called Yvette and will tell her, if asked, that the numbers are stable. Stable is not improving. Marisol has a column for that too.
In week six she builds a pretext that takes thirty-seven seconds to construct and gets her into the archive alone. What she finds there is a ledger, kept by hand, with a column headed Katangian ng Dugo. Her own surname is in it. So is her grandmother’s province.
The evaluation is scheduled for the following morning. She goes anyway, sits down across from him with a clean page, and answers every question correctly, because she has known the answers since week one and has spent the weeks since watching him know that she knew.
A Book Three novella, and the companion to The Taste of What Is Owed: the same six weeks from the other side of the desk. Either can be read first. Read it before Salt and Succession, where the same classification is applied to her daughter.
Heat note: no sexual content on the page in this novella. The slow burn is held at the tension and nothing is consummated. The novels in this series are explicit and 18+.
Book Three
Salt and Succession
“The package is sealed in wax, the old way, and it comes from Davao. Inside is a ledger — and her four-year-old daughter’s name is already in it.”
Find it on AmazonMarisol Reyes has spent five years learning to read the family she married into. She knows which of Alejandro’s registers is the controlled one and which surfaces when he crosses into the older language. She knows the Ilustre accounts better than the men who keep them. What she did not know, until the wax seal broke on a Tuesday morning in 2022, is that the procurement did not begin with her.
It begins in 1887. Her own grandmother is in the 1961 entry, annotated seven years later in a different ink, age at acquisition nineteen. And on the newest page, beside Isadora’s full name, a classification in a column headed for yield.
The assessment is on Thursday. Marisol has thirty-six hours.
She does not run and she does not burn it. She does what she has done since she was twenty-two and the most competent person in every room she was allowed into: she opens the books. Board votes mapped. Independent directors read. Affidavits drafted against a family institution that has never once had to answer a filing. And somewhere in the archive, an entry she was not looking for, in a hand older than her marriage: Ilustre, Alejandro Marcos. Assessment age: 14. Classification: primary instrument.
He was bought too. That does not settle what he chose afterward, and she is not going to let it.
Book Three of The Blood Ledger, and the end of the story. The trilogy is complete: Blood and Bone City, Marrow and Manila, Salt and Succession. Start at Book One, or finish it here.
Adult fiction, 18+. Most titles are explicit, but not all — heat level is noted on each book at /books. Read the content warnings →