Description

A nightclub for the rich and spoiled, with a basement the upstairs crowd never sees. Remy’s story opens on an examination table in that basement, being certified fit for sale. Her brother is dead over a small drug debt, the debt is now hers, and the men who killed him have goons named Bryce and Pierce shadowing her to make sure she goes through with the only repayment plan on offer: auctioning herself to the club’s world of dominance and submission on Saturday night.

The book runs on alternating chapters between Remy and James, the man on the other side of the glass. James rarely takes part in the auctions, and a first-timer with hard limits and no experience is exactly the kind of listing he distrusts; he suspects, correctly, that the woman on the tablet is not there by choice. What he bids on, and why, turns the transaction into the title: in a world built on contracts and consent, the safeword is the one piece of power Remy still holds, if the man who buys her honours it.

Slater and Quinn wrote this as the middle book of their After Dark collaboration, between Collared and Chained, each a standalone dark romance built on a captive premise. The pairing gives the book its tension: one author’s voice for the auction block, another’s for the man circling it. When freedom itself is what’s being bought, can anything that follows honestly be called a choice?