There is something uniquely grotesque about a room full of men in tailored suits bidding on human lives while lobster and champagne sit on ice. Sadie Kincaid knows this, and she does not let you forget it. From the very first pages of The Auction by Sadie Kincaid, you are placed inside a holding room where the air is thick with terror and the guards watch with hungry, predatory eyes. The horror is not sensationalized. It is made worse by how mundane it looks to the men placing bids.
Imogen DeMotta has spent twenty-one years being shaped into the perfect commodity. The daughter of a disgraced Brotherhood member, she was raised in total isolation by her cold and exacting grandfather, coached by her governess Larissa for a future she could not escape. She has never tasted coffee. She has never watched television without permission. And she has never made a single choice that was entirely her own. And when the stage lights flood her face and the bidding begins, she does not crumble. She breathes through an old nursery rhyme and refuses to give the monsters their reaction.
Then comes the bid that silences the room. Ten million dollars. One voice, from the back of the ballroom, cutting through the noise. Its owner: Lincoln Knight. Reclusive billionaire. Rumored monster. The man behind the mask.
The Beast at the End of the Wood
What Sadie Kincaid does brilliantly in The Auction by Sadie Kincaid is her refusal to let Lincoln Knight be a simple villain. The opening chapters from his perspective reveal a man operating from a deep place of guilt and long-burning obsession rather than predatory desire. His motives for attending the auction are not what the crowd assumes, and that gap between appearance and reality drives the novel’s central tension throughout.
The Gothic setting amplifies everything. RooksBlood, Lincoln’s mansion buried deep in the forest, is a masterclass in dark atmosphere. The exterior is derelict: broken windows, sagging iron gates, gargoyles half-lost to creeping ivy. Inside, the floors are black and white marble, the walls lined in dark wood panels and bloodred velvet drapes. It is simultaneously a prison and, in ways Imogen does not expect, a refuge. The Beauty and the Beast parallel Kincaid signals in the blurb is not just marketing shorthand. It is threaded into every scene: the two-story library with its rolling ladders, the secret garden hidden within crumbling greenhouse walls, the forbidden basement, the masked host who sources a first-edition copy of The Secret Garden because Imogen mentioned loving it once, in passing, over breakfast.
Pierre, Lincoln’s blind French confidant and cook, deserves his own mention. He is easily one of the strongest supporting characters in recent dark romance. Perceptive beyond his sightlessness, quietly furious with Lincoln about half the time, and unexpectedly tender with Imogen, he provides both dry comic relief and genuine emotional warmth. He is the thread that keeps the story from collapsing entirely into its own darkness, and his scenes with Imogen rank among the best in the book.
Slow Fire
The romantic tension between Imogen and Lincoln is the engine of The Auction by Sadie Kincaid, and Kincaid commits fully to the slow burn across sixty-five chapters. There is no rushed gratification here. What builds instead is something closer to mutual recognition: two people who have spent their lives locked inside their own conditioning, cautiously glimpsing the person on the other side of the wall. Lincoln holds back because he believes himself monstrous and her deserving of better. Imogen holds back because every instinct she has has been trained toward obedience and self-erasure. Watching them both begin to unlearn those instincts is genuinely moving.
Kincaid’s prose suits this pacing well. She writes in tight, alternating first-person chapters that allow each character to misread the other while the reader holds the full picture. Her sentences are clean and precise when tension demands it, layered and atmospheric in the quieter moments. She knows when to slow a scene down and when to cut hard, and the best scenes in this book know exactly which one to do.
Where the Story Finds Its Limits
The Auction by Sadie Kincaid is not without its rough edges, and a fair review acknowledges them.
Imogen’s sheltered naivety can tip into unbelievability. That a twenty-one-year-old has never had coffee, candy, or unrestricted television access is carefully explained by her isolated upbringing, but the sheer breadth of her inexperience, revealed in quick succession, occasionally strains even dark romance’s tolerance for suspended realism.
The pacing is uneven across its 65 chapters. The slow burn is intentional and largely effective, but certain stretches in the middle third feel structurally repetitive: Imogen observes Lincoln, restrains herself, retreats to the garden or the library. A tighter editorial pass would have sharpened the build without losing its cumulative power.
Lincoln’s vigilante violence is very graphic. Kincaid does not soften the brutal detail of his work outside the mansion. For dark romance readers who enjoy morally grey anti-heroes taken to their logical conclusion, this is part of the draw. For others, particularly a torture sequence in the early chapters, it may be a hard stop.
The ending is a hard cliffhanger. The revelations that close Book 1 are significant and well-constructed, but they arrive in the final chapters with some abruptness. Readers who prefer self-contained romantic arcs should know before they start that this is Book 1 of a duet, not a standalone.
Who This Book Is For
Readers who love Gothic atmosphere, morally complex heroes operating in the shadows, and heroines who discover their own strength from inside a cage will find much to admire here. Fans of Kincaid’s earlier series, particularly the Chicago Ruthless books (Dante, Joey, Lorenzo, Keres), which are set in the same universe, will find familiar pleasures alongside a notably darker and more restrained register. The Wages of Sin duet is Kincaid pulling from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as consciously as she does from mafia romance conventions, and it shows in the best possible way.
If You Want More of This
God of Malice by Rina Kent
Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
Corrupt by Penelope Douglas
The Kiss Thief by L.J. Shen
Ruthless Creatures by J.T. Geissinger
Dante by Sadie Kincaid (Chicago Ruthless series, same universe)
The Verdict
The Auction by Sadie Kincaid works hardest at its best moments: two people, each carrying the weight of eighteen years of loss and conditioning, circling each other inside a Gothic mansion while the world outside closes in around them. It has real emotional intelligence beneath its dark surface, a supporting character who steals every scene, and an atmosphere so thick it sits on your chest. Its imperfections are real but not fatal. For dark romance readers who want atmosphere, restraint, and a slow burn that earns its eventual heat, this is worth the walk through the woods.