Dark romance has always been comfortable borrowing from fairy tale, but few authors borrow with the particular confidence that Sadie Kincaid brings to her new Wages of Sin series. The Auction by Sadie Kincaid opens the duet with a premise that pulls from Beauty and the Beast, Jane Eyre, and The Secret Garden all at once, and the novel is self-aware enough to make those touchstones feel deliberate rather than derivative. The author even has her heroine find a copy of The Secret Garden inside the crumbling gothic mansion that serves as the book’s central stage. That kind of knowing intertextuality is either audacious or earned. Here, it is mostly earned.
One Nursery Rhyme and a Room Full of Monsters
Imogen DeMotta has spent twenty-one years in preparation for this night. After her parents were killed when she was three, her grandfather made a devil’s bargain with the Brotherhood, a shadowy criminal organization that deals in human trafficking and political corruption, trading her future in exchange for her life. When that future arrives, she is auctioned before a room of powerful, morally bankrupt men as the evening’s most prized lot.
The auction scene is the book’s opening gambit, and Kincaid executes it with impressive restraint. Imogen does not break. She breathes through it with a nursery rhyme, a coping mechanism she returns to in every moment of extremity throughout the novel. One, two, buckle my shoe. It is a small detail that accumulates into the book’s most haunting motif — this composed, sharp-eyed young woman counting like a child, because a child was all she was allowed to be.
The man who buys her is Lincoln Knight. Billionaire. Recluse. Rumored psychopath. He wears a ceramic mask over scarred features and pays ten million dollars without blinking. He silences an entire room with a bid. On the surface, he is exactly the kind of terrifying that Imogen has been trained to survive.
The Characters Who Make It Worth Reading
Imogen: More Than Her Conditioning
What separates The Auction by Sadie Kincaid from the wider field of captive romance is how carefully Kincaid draws Imogen DeMotta. She has been conditioned into obedience, but the novel makes steady work of showing us both the conditioning and the person underneath it — a woman who lights up at the discovery of coffee, who finds a overgrown walled garden more beautiful than any formal estate, and who secretly adores apple pie long before she lets herself taste it.
Her interiority is a quiet pleasure. She catalogues, observes, and makes dry private assessments that let the reader see how much she processes despite her composed exterior. This is not passivity out of weakness. It is survival strategy, and watching her slowly trust herself to want things is one of the novel’s most satisfying throughlines.
Lincoln: The Monster Who Isn’t
Lincoln narrates alternate chapters, and those chapters are some of the most compelling sections in the book. His backstory — eighteen years spent hunting the Brotherhood’s members in retribution for losses connected directly to Imogen’s own family — gives him weight beyond a standard dark romance hero template. He is brooding and brutal and capable of acts of graphic violence, but Kincaid is careful to make him tender in equal and specific measure.
His restraint around Imogen is principled and agonizing in equal parts. The moment he orders a first-edition copy of The Secret Garden for her and inscribes it with quiet sincerity is the emotional peak of the novel, and it lands because Kincaid has built patiently toward it.
Pierre: The Beating Heart of RooksBlood
Lincoln’s blind French butler earns his own mention in every serious review of this book. Pierre is warm, irascible, opinionated about Bruce Springsteen, and more human than either of the protagonists in almost every scene he inhabits. He is also the mechanism by which Imogen begins to understand that not everything in this house is what it first appears. Kincaid writes him with unmistakable affection, and it shows.
Gothic Atmosphere Done Right
RooksBlood — Lincoln’s mansion, apparently derelict from the outside, rich with dark wood paneling and blood-red drapes within — is not just a setting. It is a character with its own symbolic logic. The ruin masking something complex and alive beneath mirrors Lincoln perfectly. The library, the walled garden, the locked basement, the antique suit of armor standing guard in the hallway: every space carries specific meaning, and Imogen’s methodical exploration of the house feels purposeful rather than convenient.
Kincaid’s prose works best in the quieter domestic scenes. The kitchen, the garden, the firelit library. These are the moments where the book’s atmosphere is most fully realized, and where the slow burn tension between the two leads is most effectively built.
What Holds It Back
The Auction by Sadie Kincaid reads, intentionally, as a first act — and some of the first act’s limitations are structural:
- The book ends on a hard cliffhanger. Readers who need resolution with their romance may find the stopping point genuinely frustrating. The second book, The Game, does not release until November 2026.
- Lincoln’s chapters in the middle section repeat the same internal beat — desire, restraint, guilt, restraint — with diminishing freshness. The beat is established early and revisited too many times before anything shifts.
- The Brotherhood mythology is teased carefully but remains thin in this installment. The thriller architecture that surrounds the romance is atmospheric but underdeveloped, functioning more as backdrop than as story.
- Imogen’s awakening, handled with real sensitivity, loses a little momentum in the middle third. The pacing is deliberately slow, but there are stretches where slow tips into static.
None of these flaws undermine the novel’s considerable strengths, but readers going in expecting a more plot-driven experience may come away wanting.
If You Loved This, Read These Next
- God of Malice by Rina Kent (dark captive romance, morally grey hero, similar power dynamics)
- Ruthless Creatures by J.T. Geissinger (slow burn tension, enemies-to-lovers, suspense)
- The Kiss Thief by L.J. Shen (forced circumstances, gothic romance energy, dual perspectives)
- Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton (dark captive romance, gothic setting, atmospheric dread)
- Corrupt by Penelope Douglas (morally grey leads, slow burn, hidden loyalties that complicate everything)
- Dante by Sadie Kincaid (same author, Chicago Ruthless series, for readers wanting to explore Kincaid’s wider catalog)
The Verdict
The Auction by Sadie Kincaid is a confident, atmosphere-rich opening to what promises to be a genuinely compelling duet. The Beauty and the Beast comparison holds — not because Kincaid leans on it lazily, but because she earns it through character work and restraint. Imogen is a heroine worth following. Lincoln is a hero worth the wait. And Pierre is, quietly, worth the price of the book on his own.
For readers who come to dark romance for the slow build, the gothic chill, and that particular ache of watching two damaged people inch toward each other across impossible circumstances, this delivers. The cliffhanger will test your patience. The Game is a long way off. Go in knowing that, and you will find an awful lot to love here.