Sold for $1 To The Hawthorne Brothers
Three women, three brothers, a single, crumpled dollar bill.
Alina's world shatters the moment she's auctioned off-and claimed by the powerful Hawthorne brothers.
Thrown into Adrian Hawthorne's cold, dangerous world, she becomes his to control... his to protect... and, terrifyingly, his to desire. He's ruthless, possessive, and hiding secrets that could destroy them both. But the deeper she falls into his world, the harder it becomes to tell if she's his prisoner-or something far more dangerous.
Because the Hawthorne brothers don't just take.
They keep.
Viviane has spent her life surviving, so when Julian Hawthorne "buys" her freedom, she knows better than to trust it. Men like him don't save people-they collect them. But Julian isn't as simple as he pretends to be, and the deeper she's pulled into his world, the more dangerous it becomes to walk away.
Especially when she realizes she might be the only thing he's ever been willing to fight for.
Lena doesn't belong to anyone-and she intends to keep it that way. Brilliant, guarded, and hiding more than anyone suspects, she enters Lucien Hawthorne's world on her own terms. But Lucien doesn't play fair, and he doesn't let go.
When her past comes crashing back, Lena is forced to face the one thing she's been running from: trusting someone who could destroy her... or save her.
Three women. Three choices.Stay. Fight.
Or burn it all down.
Because being sold was only the beginning.
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Chapter 9
"Hey."
I jump out of my skin, staggering backwards and losing my balance at the same time. Julian reaches out, his fingers coolly slipping around my wrist and breaking my fall. "Woah," he says, "what happened in there to make you so jumpy?"
I roll my eyes at him before I can stop myself, but I don't feel any remorse seeing the twitchy smile on his lips. "You did that on purpose."
"Me?" He points at his chest, feigning ignorance with widened eyes. "Why would I do that? My brother would have my head if I stopped your heart."
"Yeah, right," I mutter under my breath, pushing my bag higher. I stare ahead, glancing around for the car. I didn't think I would miss the bodyguards, but at least they didn't talk my ear off or tease me for personal entertainment.
"Hey!" I hear Julian calling after me. "Wait up! I didn't mean it, I promise."
I know he's lying.
Julian Hawthorne might not be as cold, demanding, or thick-headed as his oldest brother, but he's definitely a walking red flag I plan on staying clear of. I didn't figure out the night at the auction, but now I know that he sees people as playthings. He enjoyed the look on Shane's face when he made him leave and the attention he got before he left the classroom.
A walking attention magnet.
"Alina?"
I can see the car now, parked in one of the restricted parking lots used by tenured professors. I walk faster, gripping my bag so it doesn't slip. The two men are standing close by, and I raise my hand, giving a small wave.
Open the door. Open the–
I see the moment they realize Julian is still following me. They bow instantly, heads facing the ground. I hear Julian's chuckle. "Please," he says. "Let's do without the formality, shall we?"
He throws an arm over my shoulders, and I cringe on the inside, shutting my eyes for a moment. "I'll be taking Miss Wilson here for a little shopping trip. You can head back to my brother. He's been informed," he adds when one of them frowns, his lips puckered tight. "You can call him if you don't believe me."
Neither of them attempts to. Either out of fear or respect for Julian...or because they trust him, I don't know. I have a sneaky feeling it's the former, though. Julian might be the youngest brother, but he's still a Hawthorne.
And I doubt Adrian would choose them over his brother.
I tilt my head his way, arching a brow. "Why would I go shopping? I have clothes." More than enough, actually. And it's not like I'll be attending parties or dining with the one percent of New York City. I might live with Adrian, but I haven't forgotten what I am to him.
Julian leans in with a cheeky smile. "You see, there's a party happening tonight. My brother doesn't think you should attend, but I think you're part of the family now. Somebody is bound to find out that you live with him and..." he waves a hand around. "You know how rumors go around."
He rubs his hands together. "So, before they come to their conclusion, I think it's best to set our story straight."
"What? That I didn't get auctioned off? That your family didn't buy me for a dollar?" I bite, scoffing under my breath. I sigh, feeling a little guilty. It wasn't Julian who held the paddle. "They'll ask questions. I'm not rich, like you. And I don't want to go against your brother."
Justin shakes his head. "The thing about Adrian is that sometimes he doesn't know what's good for him. And about looking the part?" He taps his nose. "Well, that's why you have me. I'm something of a fashion connoisseur. You'd fit right in; nobody would think to ask you any questions."
"Except for where you got your dress," he adds smugly. "So? What do you say?"
I've been to parties before. Birthday parties, with a few slices of cake to go around. I once crashed a wedding because they held it in the gazebo of a conservatory. I didn't know the punch was spiked, and I ended up doing a dance number for the bridesmaids.
A fancy party with New York's richest.
I glance down at my clothes-at my plain shirt and jeans. "I guess I could–"
Julian grabs my arm, not waiting for me to finish. "Let's go. You'll love it, I promise." He drags me over to where a Bentley convertible is parked, with a bunch of younger college students taking pictures with it. They scatter when it beeps, staring with dropped jaws as Julian opens the door for me.
He sweeps a hand out, doing a little bow. "In you go, my lady."
"You don't have to do that," I mutter through clenched teeth. "They're going to think we're dating. It's enough that you made a scene in my class. I don't want some girl ambushing me because she thinks I'm not good enough for you."
Julian raises his head. The corner of his lips lifts, but the smile doesn't reach his eyes. "Then maybe I should warn them that my brother doesn't tread light with what belongs to him."
I swallow my retort of, "I'm not property," as I slip into the car. I ignore the slight shiver in my chest and the way my breath catches softly as I replay Julian's words in my head.
What belongs to him.
In other words, property. It should make me angry, but the tingling in my chest says otherwise.
"Ready to go?"
I nod curtly as Julian sits behind the wheel. He points to my seatbelt. "You might want to use that, because it gets a little fast." I buckle up quickly, clinging to the belt as a lifeline. If I know Julian Hawthorne, "little fast" means he's about to beat every traffic sign and drive us over a cliff, if possible.
He laughs when he sees my death grip. "Don't worry, I won't get us into an accident. I wasn't joking when I said Adrian would have my head if something happened to you." The tingling comes again. I ignore it, focusing on the cars as Julian speeds past them.
He's only trying to make me feel better, I tell myself. I can't be worth that much to him, not even if my stepfather promised to sell his soul. Or my soul.
I go through every dress in the designer fashion house. At least that's how it feels after three hours of stepping into the dressing room, tugging all kinds of fabric over my body, then having to watch Julian shake his head.
"No."
"Too plain."
"Too flashy."
"Why is that sold here?" This one was to the manager, after she heard we were in the store and came to offer assistance. At least I got a glass of champagne from it.
"Would you wear this?" He said it to one of the salespersons. "Maybe you would, but it's not good enough for her."
"Maybe I shouldn't go." I'd said at some point. He simply shook his head, a strange gleam in his eye. "You have to be there."
Finally, we were ushered to a showroom with dresses and designs that hadn't been released to the public. I fall in love with the first one I see. A soft yellow dress with a dramatic V-neckline at the front and a decolletage sweeping downward into a mermaid-style skirt, with short cap sleeves and a plunging back.
I finger the soft material, and it feels like a murmured, smoky whisper against my skin.
"You'd look perfect in it," the manager gushes. "With your body figure..." she gestures, "it might have well been made for you."
My body.
I've never thought too much about my body. I didn't think it was the best, but I knew I couldn't change it either. I didn't have the luxury of weight loss dieting or the money for tucks here and there. Julian walks over, holding an open box. "These would pair nicely."
My breath catches audibly in my chest as I stare at the most gorgeous pair of silver earrings. "I–"
"Yup," he nods. "I told you. You just had to trust me. I can't wait to see the look on Adrian's face when he sees you."
Adrian?
I frown a little, but the thought of him slides in, uninvited, his face vivid in my head. A delicate shiver runs down my spine as my fingers sink into my dress, settling as a flutter in my stomach.
He wouldn't care. He doesn't want me there in the first place.
I tell myself that, but when the gown slips down my body, framing the curves I always thought were average, I can't help but wonder what Adrian Hawthorne would think.
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7.7
Not only was I drugged, blinded and assaulted. I was deceived into carrying a baby by a stranger I never knew. Then he appeared and took my child away.
I was sent to a militia by the father of my child. I thought I was rescued but I was recruited to be a weapon for killing. Who was manipulating me, I didn't know. The answers were far from what I knew.
Forced to blend into the world that I could never believe I would be to, a place where brutality reigned, kill or be killed was the only language. I have survived but he has to pay for everything he did to me, because I believed every phase of my life was set by him and him alone. Have I really survived?
Who would have thought, he existed twice in the same world? Do I really know who I should take revenge on? Him or the person I would sacrifice everything for?
Was my mother the one who orchestrated everything? What kind of pawn am I?
8.4
I worked three double shifts at the garage just to buy a velvet-boxed cake for my wealthy girlfriend, Arleen.
But when I pushed open the VIP room door, I saw her lover kissing her bare leg.
She didn't push him away. Instead, she laughed and swirled her martini.
"I only forgot Finn because I knew he would stay. He is a poor boy from Queens who follows me around like a loyal dog."
Later that night, her lover intentionally crashed a Porsche to scare me, sending a piece of jagged metal into my skull.
Lying in a growing pool of my own blood, I watched Arleen crawl out of the wreckage.
She didn't even look at me. She threw herself at her uninjured lover, screaming for a medic.
"He just got scraped by a piece of plastic. He is faking it. Deal with Jaquez first!"
When I woke up, I wasn't free. Arleen had locked me in a private hospital wing with 24-hour security, planning to isolate me and keep me as her broken, captive toy forever.
My blind, pathetic devotion finally froze into absolute disgust.
I looked at the heart monitor next to my bed and grabbed an IV needle.
I severed the sensor wire to trigger a flatline, slipped out the fire stairs while the nurses panicked, and burned my identity to ashes.
This time, I was going to disappear to London, build my own empire, and watch hers burn.
7.4
In a city where data is power and truth is a weapon, some secrets are worth killing for.
Mara Quinn is a ghost in the system, an underground journalist known only as Cipher, feared by corporations and hunted by those with everything to lose. When she breaches a classified network inside Axiom Industries, she uncovers something no one was meant to see: ORACLE, a predictive AI capable of shaping human behavior on a global scale.
She expects retaliation. She doesn't expect Kael Draven.
Cold, brilliant, and untouchable, Kael is the architect behind Axiom's empire, and a man who doesn't make threats he can't execute. Instead of silencing Mara, he offers her a choice: work under his watch, or disappear from existence entirely. Trapped inside his glass fortress known as The Spire, Mara is pulled deeper into a world of surveillance, manipulation, and power plays that stretch far beyond anything she imagined.
But ORACLE isn't just a tool, it's already been used. Governments have fallen. Empires have shifted. And someone else is pulling the strings.
As a rival syndicate closes in and a hidden war erupts across the city, Mara and Kael are forced into an uneasy alliance, one built on intellect, suspicion, and a dangerous, undeniable pull neither of them can ignore.
Because in a world where every move is predicted...
the only thing more dangerous than control is feeling.
And the system is already watching.
7.5
Kaitlyn Barton POV:
After three years building my family's hotel empire abroad, I came home to New York, expecting a warm embrace from my childhood fiancé, Edwin.
Instead, he greeted me with a warning. He told me to be gentle with his new girlfriend, Kacy, painting me as a villain before I even knew her name.
At my own welcome-home party, he let her stage a dramatic fall and then publicly blamed me for it, his eyes burning with a hatred I'd never seen.
He cradled her in his arms as if she were a fragile doll I had broken.
"Happy now, Kaitlyn?" he snarled, shattering twenty years of our shared history in front of everyone we knew.
In his eyes, I was no longer his love, but a monster he needed to protect his new flame from.
As he stormed out, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Everett Rowe, the man who had quietly loved me for five years.
"If you are truly ready, I will marry you. Right now. Just say the word."
My fingers moved on their own.
"Yes," I typed. "I'll marry you."
The moment I stepped back onto New York soil, a city I had once shared completely with Edwin, he greeted me not with a hug, but with a warning about his new girlfriend, painting me as the villain before I even knew her name. Three years abroad, cultivating my family's hotel empire, had prepared me for many business battles, but nothing for the cold, calculated betrayal that awaited me at home. He had replaced me, and then twisted our shared history, turning me into the aggressor he now needed protection from. This was not the reunion I had envisioned, nor the Edwin I remembered. My heart, which had swelled with anticipation, now froze into a solid block of ice.
8.4
On the night before her wedding, Navia Harrison discovers her fiancé in bed with her step-sister-and worse, the two of them are already planning how to get rid of her after the marriage.
Humiliated and consumed by hatred, Navia exposes their affair during the wedding ceremony itself, destroying both families' reputations in a single move.
Then, she meets him.
Leonel Crawford - the cold and dangerously powerful head of the Crawford family. Untouchable. Ruthless. A man no woman has ever been able to keep close.
He's also her ex-fiancé's uncle.
One impulsive proposal changes everything.
"If you need a wife... marry me instead."
"Honestly... we'd make a pretty good match."
9.0
My father was dying in the ICU, and our family company, the Martin Group, was on the verge of total collapse.
While I was desperately trying to sign the consent form for his life-saving surgery, my fiancé, Eston, sent me a text.
"I told you not to be stubborn. The company is mine by Friday. Beg me, and I might pay for the funeral."
He had been secretly looting my family's assets from the inside, waiting for me to break so he could steal everything. He thought I would crawl back to him in absolute despair, surrendering my father's legacy just to survive. The sheer weight of my helplessness crushed my chest as the heart monitor next to my father's bed let out a frantic, high-pitched scream.
The betrayal tore through me, but the despair quickly hardened into a cold, sharp stone.
Why should I let the man who ruined me dance on my family's grave? Why should I let him walk away with everything while I lost the only family I had left?
I wiped away my tears and blocked his number permanently.
Then, I stepped out into the freezing Manhattan rain and went straight to the top floor of the Maxwell building.
I threw my remaining shares onto the desk of Ellwood Maxwell—the apex predator of Wall Street, and Eston's untouchable, ruthless uncle.
"I want you to marry me," Ellwood said, pushing a marriage contract toward me. "That is the only way your company survives."
I picked up the pen. If Eston wanted to destroy my life, I would become his aunt and make him bow.