The Night Auction

by Lila Mary

For a gemeyes, love is a prison. What happens when it could mean freedom?
Aric is a gemeyes, a powerful and heavily regulated mage in the second class of Vadare society. His whole life, his only goal has been survival—not dreams, and certainly not love. When an old debt comes knocking, Aric is forced to turn to The Night Auction, a club where gemeyes go to be auctioned off for dates.
There, he is bought by Kyrell Tierwood, a first class lord who's kinder and handsomer than any Aric has ever met. Kyrell's main draw is his wealth, which Aric needs to pay his debt and protect the family secret.
Aric's plan is seduce the money he needs out of Kyrell and then leave him. It's not love, it's business. However, Aric didn't count on his seduction turning into something real. As Aric and Kyrell navigate coexistence, Aric is torn between two the love he's fostering with Kyrell, and the secret he will do anything to keep.

252 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2025

About the author

Lila Mary has always craved fantasy romance books where queer characters existed just like everyone else—so, she writes them! When she isn’t daydreaming in fantasy worlds, she can be found entertaining her cats. She was born and raised in California.

Reviews

[A.M. Birch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an Advanced Reading Copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Imagine Pretty Woman, only gayer and in Westeros*.

Does that appeal to you? Great! Then you’ll probably love this book.

Unfortunately for me, I don’t personally like GoT or Pretty Woman very much, so this book wasn’t really for me. But I had a fascinating time reading it, and I was impressed by the author’s creativity.

(*No actual affiliation with ASoIaF - fewer gruesome murders, less wintery - but aspirations towards similar dark fantasy serious tone and context.)

Some mild spoilers below (only stuff that is mentioned in the first couple of chapters), just the necessary context to discuss the points I wanted to address. Also content warning for references to sexual abuse.

My biases, for transparency:
- Okay, I’ll say it - I don’t like present tense for novels. I think it’s usually choppy and ugly, and needlessly confusing to boot. (The number of times I’ve read a scene where ‘he pants’, and been very puzzled about when and how the trousers got involved... Just me? Ah well.) As a result, any time I start a book and find it’s in present tense, I give a little sigh. But! I try not to dock points for that, since it’s purely personal taste, and overall the tense didn’t bother me too much in this one.
- I dislike side characters. That might sound weird, but hear me out - if your side characters exist to further the plot and then get out of the way, great! If they exist because the main characters need to be humanised by interactions with others/pass some kind of pseudo-Bechdel test of interacting with people who aren’t their love interest, and/or if they exist purely because you thought they were cool? I’ve already checked out and I’m counting down the pages in my head until the next scene that actually matters. So any story that is trying to sell me on a lot of side characters and wants me to think they’re neat is already fighting an uphill battle. It isn’t fair, and some side characters I detest will be absolutely beloved to people other than me - so I wouldn’t ever knowingly use this as a factor in what makes a book worth reading, but again, it’s worth noting where my feelings lie.
- I am also just simply not an enjoyer of a lot of the tropes that were in play in this book, such as:
- Institutionalised sexual slavery dystopia
- Implications of traumatic/forced sex work
- Implications of past sexual abuse
- Implications of past gang-rape (or just being whored out to friends in ones and twos, really, who’s counting)
- Evil exes
- And my very own pet peeve, the psychic best friend who ships the leads

I recognise that some of these, like the master/slave dynamic, are presumably part of the point for the writer and many readers. That’s cool, not a judgement on its value or a moral stance. Just clarifying what I mean when I say this story was written for an audience other than me.

Overall, I think I ended up having two different experiences with book: One as a reader, one as a writer.

As a reader, if I had picked the story up on a whim I would probably have stopped after the first couple of chapters. I kept at it despite the things I didn’t enjoy because I’d taken on the read with the promise of writing a review, and from the reader perspective, all the things I was worried about actually didn’t come true - it wasn’t a story wallowing in the grimdark nature of the sexual abuse it references early on, nor did it follow the traditional path of sexualising slavery and unhealthy power dynamics in the way that most master/slave romance stories do. So from that perspective, I was pleasantly surprised by the book. I think it set out with good intentions and, at least regarding the dark topics it sold itself on, it managed to avoid many of the common pitfalls. By the end, the book still wasn’t written for me, but my impressions were much more positive than I’d assumed they might be at the start.

As a writer, I had a much more complex and interesting time with the book, and I’m cordoning off these thoughts because they’re probably not actually useful to anyone reading this review, but I couldn’t help processing the experience much as one might a logic puzzle.

This is my fifth attempt at writing a review of this book, for context. I’ve written and discarded a novella’s worth of thoughts about it already, so I’ll do my best to distill this into a few salient points that stuck out to me.

1. While as a reader I was quite relieved that the story didn’t ever delve deeper into the sexual abuse backstory, I was also conflicted about it - this is a serious topic, and I feel if you’re going to raise it, you need to do it justice. While the author did avoid any ghoulish exploitation, they did so by completely dropping the topic after the opening chapters, and it had no bearing on the victim or the narrative for the rest of the story. I felt as though I’d been built up to expect some stakes to this concept, so as a reader, it was anticlimactic. As a writer, it felt like a mistake, as it undermined its own significance and sapped tension from the later scenes revolving around the villainous abuser. By the end, I was wondering if I’d misread the opening scenes and imagined the severity of the alleged abuse altogether, but no, on reread, I can confirm that the implications are there, they just don’t matter.

2. I found the themes very muddy. According to the author’s notes, the story is supposed to have some allegorical relationship to queer liberation and why it’s important to come out, but I didn’t see any of that myself. If that exists, it’s largely secondary to the themes of racial segregation and subjugation. The main character is ‘closeted’ in that he hides his racial identity so he won’t be harassed and abused, and when he ‘comes out’ it’s either accidental or due to forces beyond his control. He never makes a decision to do so, he receives no personal or social benefits for doing so, and the only reason he isn’t actively punished is due to his uniquely protected status as the slave of a particularly wealthy and influential man, so his experiences are not applicable to anyone else. His owner/lover is also not one of the ‘queer’ people, as he’s a cleareyes rather than the subjugated gemeyes, so I was unable to find any allegory there either. As a reader, that was a bit confusing - as a writer, it tangled me up so much I wrote literally thousands of words trying to make sense of it. This feels like something that should have been looked at with an editing pass so the points the author wanted to make could be polished and clarified into a much stronger thematic arc.

3. The tagline for the book reads: ‘Is it love or is it captivity?’, and honestly, I don’t think it ever answers that question.
The story never uses the word slave, but that’s functionally what the main character becomes when he’s sold into ‘servitude’ to the love interest. That’s fine, it’s a dark concept that has a place in a dark story. What puzzled me is the way the stakes of this fact are essentially removed instantly.
This should be dark, and it should create a complex relationship between the slave and the owner, but it doesn’t. Kyrell is already a perfect person when he buys Aric; he has to be told some rather basic facts about gemeyes, like which words are slurs and whether slaves are allowed last names, but otherwise he is a flawless paragon who always does and says the right thing. He never frightens, hurts, or coerces Aric, he never makes any demands or punishes Aric for anything. The fact that Kyrell owns Aric seems to be the point of the story, but is made utterly irrelevant by the nature of the characters. By the end, it’s essentially forgotten. Aric has sold himself, but he never experiences any consequences from that. He is never freed, because he doesn’t need to be - being Kyrell’s slave has no downsides. This is where the Pretty Woman analogy really comes in: The fantasy of being uplifted from poverty and prejudice, being taken care of and becoming powerful by association with the rich man who pays for you to live on their terms. That’s all fine if you enjoy that sort of thing, but it extracted every scrap of narrative tension from the concept as a result. From a writerly perspective, I wanted to see some character development and conflict from this juicy hook, but I was left grasping at nothing and disappointed by the lack.

4. Speaking of things that I was surprised to find absent: For a ‘sexy’ story, there sure was zero sex. The characters head off stage left to make whoopie a couple of times, but this is a smutless book. That’s fine, not at all suggesting it would’ve been better if the sex scenes had played out on-page, I just found it noteworthy: So if you’re here for the ‘sexy’ part of the tagline, don’t get your hopes up too high! I didn’t mind it personally, but I did find it odd, partly because of the description emphasising it (I’m not sure why you’d sell your book as sexy if it’s sexless, personally?) and partly because of the baggage of the story’s concept; maybe I’ve just spent too much time on the more X-rated parts of the internet, but the master-slave dynamic seems an inherently sexualised fantasy to me, or I’m not sure what the point of it is. (Admittedly, it’s not one I enjoy either way.) Given the story didn’t do anything with it narratively, the fact that it also didn’t do anything with it smuttily was quite puzzling to me. I would love to know what the background was for this decision.

5. Man, what is up with the victim blaming? I think this must be entirely inadvertent from the author, but there were a couple of bits that really threw me on this one because of how they were framed in the narrative. For one, the auctioneer who helps people prostitute themselves/sell themselves as slaves makes a big opening speech explaining to the reader that the subjugated people who are desperately seeking money ‘chose to come here, you are all responsible for your own fates’ (hello, liability insurance waiver, is that you?). There are also numerous instances emphasising the idea of being a ‘good slave’ as more important than protecting your own interests - with comments like how it’s shockingly gauche to be ‘rude’ to someone who has purchased you. There’s also a long subplot treating another enslaved character as a villain and a gold-digger for not being in love with his master, putting him in the same category as Aric’s abusive ex-owner apparently because he wanted what Aric ultimately gets - respect and financial security - without also having to put out or put up with his owner patronising him by pretending they’re equals, which felt like a significant thematic misstep to me. Oh, and don’t get me started on the big sister - love it when my closest loved ones scream at me and slap me violently and repeatedly every time they discover I’ve been violated and abused by the apartheid regime we live in! I was really baffled by all these choices, and while I don’t think any of them are inherently wrong, I genuinely couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to take them at face value the way the narrative does or to view them as fucked up parts of the nightmarish world they live in.

6. Plot holes? I don’t know if that’s a fair description, but there were quite a few points where I went ‘huh’ and thought of several alternative decisions the main character could have made with far less problematic results. Honestly, I don’t think I would have minded that all that much if the story had taken its high-stakes concepts and run with them, but because it undermined itself at every turn, I was left looking for any source of conflict or tension and kept finding more and more ways the characters could have dealt more effectively with their situation. I wouldn’t normally dock a book any points for that, because look, people make bad choices all the time, and that’s the stuff stories are built on, but the more the tension seeped away, the more I found myself picking at the seams. The biggest offenders were both the inciting incident and the way the ending wrapped up, which is unfortunate, because there was so much here that I wanted to be engaged by.

All that said, I find myself oddly attached to this story in spite of its flaws. I think it has a lot of potential, and the parts of it that were frustrating to me were all because of that - missed opportunities or areas that could have been brushed up easily with a bit of additional care and support from beta readers or an editor. So much of what tripped me up felt like stuff that was self-explanatory to the author or just slipped by without being examined as closely as it deserved.

I only caught a couple of grammar errors that I’ll chalk up to typos/common misconceptions, which is impressive for an indie author who I assume may well be self-proofing. (‘In to’ and ‘into’ are not interchangeable and have different uses! But grammar checkers often don’t catch this one, and in fact autocorrect frequently switches mine to the wrong one and I have to manually fix it, so I don’t consider that a real mistake on the author’s part.) On the other hand, I spotted the correct use of ‘free rein’! (As opposed to ‘free reign’, which is not a thing. This is a horse metaphor, not a ruling monarch one! Write that down in your jotters, kids.) Cannot tell you how often I see those two mixed up, so good job dodging that bullet. The point is, it was clear the author had put in effort to polish the story she’d written. I appreciated that.

To be real, I’ll put my hand up and say that there’s probably no version of this book that I would have loved, because it’s just not written with me in mind. I reached out for an ARC based on the promo post on Tumblr, and at a glance, it seemed like it might be right in my wheelhouse. Nuanced queer fantasy that isn’t afraid of serious subject matter! Complex emotional bonds and a push-pull romance! Hell yeah, that’s my jam. So I was very much prepared to love this book.

I didn’t end up loving it, and I think the reasons are twofold: The content that just wasn’t for me, and the parts that I feel needed a bit more work. Even if none of the content decisions had changed, though, I think it could have really caught my imagination creatively if it had been given a bit more polish.

My impression of the book was that it was a very solid first draft that would have benefited from being set aside for a few months, reassessed, proofed and discussed with others for a fresh perspective, and reworked into a more finished product. In that world, I think I would have been much more excited by the results.

All that said, I did enjoy the reading experience. It moved briskly, the characters were overall charming, the writing itself was solid and the creativity on show was undeniable. The author says that she wrote the book quickly, in a feverish rush of inspiration, and I can definitely see the passion of that creation on display. But my final thoughts about it are, I suppose, that this one could’ve used a little more time to cook.

[Jess C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book from the author, in exchange for an honest review.

This is an interesting and ambitious book, which has lots of potential, even though quite a few aspects of it didn't quite land for me. Despite being described as 'dark' I actually found the majority of the story to be fairly light-hearted, with the darker aspects limited to the vaguely-described backstory which acts as the main character's motivation.

The first half of this book was engaging and lively, setting up the plot - some politics, proposed law changes, a mysterious book, and a poisoning - and likeable characters for the story. The second half dragged a bit, with the focus moving away from the plot, while the characters went on a sort of educational tour of teaching moments around the social and racial issues of the world.

The author's note at the end of the novel described the story as being one of queer liberation and power, but that didn't gel with my reading experience. The society was queer-friendly, and the social issues the characters encountered and had to overcome were race-based more than anything else. From a queer perspective, I didn't really get a sense of connection with the issues that the characters were facing, and thus didn't feel that the power moment near the end spoke to me.

Overall, though, I enjoyed my time with The Night Auction, and read it in two sittings during some slow shifts at work. It would definitely have been improved with some editing, and some strengthening of certain parts to make sure it's doing what it set out to do, but the novel is impressively error-free, and an easy read.

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book from the author in exchange for a review.

The Night Auction follows Aric, a gemeyes - someone with magic - who auctions himself to a cleareyes - those without magic, who hold the power in society - named Kyrell in hopes of clearing his debts. I was immediately drawn into the world and thought the beginning was strong, introducing flawed yet likeable characters and intriguing conflicts. My main issue with the story was that I felt many of the conflicts were solved too easily, and as a result the stakes didn't get a chance to ramp up enough. I found myself wishing it had delved deeper into the moral ambiguities teased at the start of the story. I also wish the magic had been explored more in depth because it was a very interesting concept. Overall I did enjoy reading The Night Auction but I think some aspects could have been stronger.

[The Backlist Book]

I was provided with an ARC PDF for review by the author. This book is currently a dnf for me. I will reconsider reading it after it's been published. I found there were some Grammar and syntax issues.

There is potential for a great story in here. It needs some heavy editing. I had a glance through the rest and found that the bulk of the story seems written in first person with third person use of names. Lots of telling, I tend to prefer more showing. I hope the author has a trusted editor.