BOOK 2 It Ends with Greed_ The Orwell Betrayal Series MARCH 4 (1) Complete Hausa Novel Document by BOOK 2 It Ends with Greed_ The Orwell Betrayal Series MARCH 4 (1)

BOOK 2

It Ends With Greed 

A Novel Inspired by True Events

The Orwell Betrayal Series                                                                                                            

USA Book Reviews Bestselling Author

BY: JADEN AKIN 

THE NOVEL

The Nwams gave Orwell Locke everything. He repaid them with lies.

Elena trusted him with her savings, the money meant for her future. When she asks for it back, Orwell has nothing but excuses. The cash is gone. Spent. He's trapped, and trapped men do terrible things.

One question. One demand. One moment of rage. Elena never comes home. Her body tells the story Orwell won't. A sister murdered. A family shattered. The man they loved like family becomes the man who destroyed them. The Nwams buried their trust in him. Now they bury their daughter.

This is what greed does. This is how families break.

Volume 3 reveals what happens when grief turns to blood.

_______________

THE AUTHOR

Jaden Akin writes about the things people don't say out loud. Born into a world that taught him to notice cracks beneath perfect surfaces, Akin builds his stories from the quiet betrayals that happen inside families, the kindness that gets mistaken for weakness, the greed that rots relationships from the inside out. His work doesn't flinch. It looks directly at what destroys us and asks why we let it happen. MO: The Living Ghost, his international bestselling debut, introduced readers to a writer unafraid of difficult truths. With The Cost of Kindness, he returns to the page with a story pulled from real life, a family torn apart by the very generosity that defined them. It's the kind of story that makes you rethink who you trust and why. Akin writes from wherever his work takes him, chasing narratives that won't let him sleep. He believes the best stories aren't invented. They're survived. This is one of them.

PROLOGUE

It Begins With Want

The road outside Boundary Market was loud that evening, the way Lagos roads get loud just before dark, when everyone is trying to get somewhere before the city decides to swallow them whole. Motorbikes threaded between danfo buses. A woman balanced a tray of tomatoes on her head and moved through the traffic without breaking her stride. Somewhere behind her, a man argued with a bread seller over the price of something that used to cost less.

Orwell stood still in the middle of all of it. He was seventeen, tall and lean in the way boys get when they grow faster than their families can feed them. He wore a faded grey shirt tucked into black trousers that were a size too short at the ankle. His shoes were clean. He was always deliberate about that, at least. He had learned early that people looked at shoes when they were deciding what kind of person you were.

The display window caught his attention the way it always did when he walked this stretch of road. Smartphones sat behind the glass in a row, lit from beneath, polished to the kind of clean that things only look when nobody has touched them yet. The prices were written in neat red markers on white cards. He did not need to read the numbers. He had memorized them weeks ago.

The glass gave his reflection back to him, faint and slightly distorted. He looked at his own face for a moment and then looked past it, at the devices behind it, at the apps on those screens that moved money the way water moves, quietly, invisibly, from one place to another without ever having to carry it in your hands.

He thought, there has to be a faster way. He did not call it greed. Not then. He called it thinking. He called it figuring things out. He was always figuring things out.

* * *

Orwell had learned early that hunger came in layers. There was the kind that twisted your stomach when the pot was empty. He understood that hunger. It was sharp but it was honest. You ate and it passed.  But there was another kind of hunger. The kind that had no honest name.

It had gotten louder the day Mr. Obi's son came home from Covenant University during Christmas break the year before. The boy had stepped out of a tinted SUV in the kind of clothes that did not shout money but carried it effortlessly. A watch that caught light without asking for attention. Shoes so plain they must have cost a fortune. Orwell had stood at the edge of the compound with his arms folded and his expression neutral, which was the expression he wore when he was doing calculations in his head.

The boy spoke English the way certain people do, not carefully, not with effort, but with the confidence of someone who had never had to think about whether his voice belonged in a room. He spoke about school, internships, Lagos Island, and plans to travel after graduation. Nobody in Ajegunle spoke about after graduation like that. Like it was a place you could count on reaching.

Adrian had listened with curiosity. Elena had listened with her professional face, the one she used when she was being polite from a distance. Mama had nodded with the approval she saved for other people's children. Orwell had listened and calculated. Tuition. Accommodation. Books. Lifestyle. Five years minimum. He had done the math the way he always did. It would take him decades to come close.

That night on his mat, he had stared at the ceiling and understood something that sat in his chest like a stone. Hard work was not the same thing as access. You could sweat every day of your life and still stand outside certain doors. The realization did not make him bitter right away. It made him restless. And restlessness, when it has nowhere honest to go, starts looking for shortcuts.

When his WAEC results came back and confirmed what he had already suspected about himself and books, the restlessness found a sharper edge. He began paying closer attention to things he had once taken for granted. The way people treated Elena differently since she started handling money at the shop. The way Justin walked taller as his business grew. The way Adrian moved through the world like someone whose future was already waiting for him.

Respect followed money. Influence followed access. And access followed power. For him, football felt uncertain. Apprenticeship felt slow. Hustle was just another word for exhaustion with better lighting. He wanted scale. He wanted the kind of distance that gets erased in a single jump. And so he had started asking questions. Careful questions, to careful people. He told himself it was just research. Just curiosity. Just preparation. But that was the lie he told the version of himself that still wanted to be decent.

Greed never announces itself. It begins as comparison. It grows on justification. And when it finally acts, it has already convinced you that you deserve whatever you are about to take.

* * *

Mr. Obi’s device shop sat on a corner of the market the way a new thing sometimes does, too clean, too organized, slightly out of place, like a sentence that does not quite belong in the paragraph around it. Elena had managed it with careful hands and careful planning. She had hung a hand-painted sign above the door. She had kept the record books herself, in a handwriting so neat it looked printed.

Orwell watched all of it whenever he passed that route. He watched the way Elena's name began to mean something in the neighborhood, the way people said it with a nod, with the particular tone reserved for people who have earned a kind of quiet respect. He watched the cash tin. He told himself he was just noticing.

He told himself a lot of things.

By the time December came around again, the thing inside him had teeth. He was not yet sure how he would use them. He only knew that he was tired of standing at the edge of other people's futures, watching from the outside, with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged into a neutrality that was starting to cost him something.

He did not tell anyone what he was thinking. He never did.

* * *

This is the part of the story that matters. Not what Orwell did. Not the specific thing, not yet. But what came before it. The weeks and months when the decision was still soft enough to change. When it was still only a thought and not a plan. When someone, anyone, a word from his Papa, a conversation with Adrian, a moment of honest friendship, might have been enough to pull him back from it.

But no one knew to look for him there. He had hidden himself too well. And so the year moved forward the way years do, without asking anyone's permission, and Orwell moved with it, deeper into the kind of thinking that has no good ending.

The hunger was still there. The hunger was always there. He had only stopped pretending it was about food.

That night, the generator hummed somewhere deep in the other compound. His mother stirred a pot in the kitchen. His brother shoes scraped on the concrete outside as he came in from his evening walk.

Ordinary sounds. Ordinary life. None of them knew that something had already been decided in the silence of the room where Orwell lay on his mat, eyes open, calculating.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph  

Prologue: It Begins With Want  

CHAPTER 1: Same Life, Different Routes

CHAPTER 2: When Opportunity Walks In 

CHAPTER 3: The Cost of Truth

CHAPTER 4: The Beginning of Greed

CHAPTER 5: Legacies vs Rivalry

CHAPTER 6: Two Kinds of Hunger

CHAPTER 7: Joyful Greif 

CHAPTER 8: What He Could Have Been

CHAPTER 9: The Lockdown

CHAPTER 10: After the Silence

CHAPTER 11: Too Good to be True

CHAPTER 12: Impending Doom

CHAPTER 13: Dream Come True

CHAPTER 14: When the Past Attacks the Present

CHAPTER 15: Between Death and Life

CHAPTER 16: It Ends with Greed

Epilogue

Book 3 Preview

Review Request

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

They say an idle mind is the devil's workshop. But I want you to sit with something harder than that. Something that kept me awake long after I first heard this story.

Greed does not come for you wearing its own face.

It comes for you wearing the face of ambition. Of hunger. Of wanting something better for yourself and the people you love. It does not announce itself at the door. It slips in through a crack you left open the night you decided that what you had was not enough. And by the time you recognize it, by the time you finally say its name out loud, it has already moved in. It has already rearranged the furniture. It has already made itself at home inside the choices you cannot take back.

This is a story about a young man who wanted more. And that, in itself, is not a crime. The wanting is human. The wanting is honest. But wanting without limits is something else entirely, and this book will show you exactly what that something else looks like when it is given enough time and silence to grow.

What I need you to understand, before you turn another page, is that the people in this story are not strangers to you. You have sat across a table from someone like Orwell. You have shaken hands with someone like him at a church program or a job interview or a family gathering. You may have even seen him in the mirror on a day when life felt unfair, when the distance between where you were and where you wanted to be felt too wide to cross honestly.

That is the part no one likes to admit. The line between ambition and greed is not always a wall. Sometimes it is a single step. Sometimes it is a decision made at two in the morning when no one is watching and the justification sounds almost reasonable.

Somewhere in Lagos, in a place called Ajegunle where the streets carry the weight of a thousand unfinished dreams, a boy learned early that hunger came in more than one form. He understood the hunger of an empty plate. That kind was honest. It arrived, it announced itself, and when food came, it left. But the other kind, the kind that does not leave even when the plate is full, that one is the one that changes people. That one is the one this story is really about.

I will not pretend this is comfortable reading. It is not meant to be. Because the truth about greed, the real truth that nobody wants to write on the church banner or the motivational poster, is that it does not always begin in a boardroom. It does not begin with a villain rubbing his hands together in the dark. It begins with a boy standing outside a display window looking at smartphones he cannot afford. It begins with the calculation of what other people have and what he does not. It begins with a thought that feels so small and so private that it seems harmless.

It begins, as most dangerous things do, as a feeling that has not yet decided what it will become.

You are about to walk through a world where love and betrayal sleep in the same bed, where loyalty has a price tag, and where one man's need to matter costs everyone around him more than any of them bargained for.

I am not asking you to forgive him. I am asking you to understand how it happened. Because understanding is the only thing that has ever protected any of us from becoming the very thing we would never have believed we could become.

Read carefully. Pay attention to the small moments. The small moments are where everything is decided.

They welcomed him as family. Then he took what wasn't his. When Elena demanded the truth, everything changed.

Her death leaves the Nwam family with grief, questions, and a hunger for justice. But grief can become dangerous when a family has nothing left to lose.

Trust opened the door. Greed crossed the line. Volume 3 reveals what happens when grief turns to blood.