Leah Daly has learned to survive by staying quiet. At home, silence keeps her safe. At school her mouth is her biggest tool. Until Tadhg Lynch - the boy she loathes - starts seeing through the cracks she worked to hard to keep hidden. Tadhg Lynch isn't looking for anyone to save him. He's got enough ghosts of his own. - A past that still haunts him and a father's shadow he can't outrun. Somehow, he can't seem to stay away from Leah.

Tadhg Lynch is fire and silence. With a brutal past and a father who taught him fear behind closed doors, Tadhg wears his trauma like armor-sharp, defensive, and unreadable. To most, that is. Nightmares consume him, trust eludes him, and oeace is a foreign language he's convinced he would never come close to understanding. He recognizes pain the same way others recognize faces-especially in her. Ciara Bellemore is light dimmed too soon. Graceful and polite on the outside, but broken and dead on the inside. She hides bruises beneath long sleeves and Jope beneath whispered prayers. With a mother fading from illness and a home filled with silence and control, Ciara clings to the only comfort she has the knowledge of-angels, feathers, and a belief in something better. When they collide, it's as though fire had met water. An invisible strength kept pulling each other into their orbit-either taunting the other with their presence or showing them what it owes.

Everyone remembers the Lynch fire. Everyone remembers the bodies carried out. But no one remembers the boy left standing in the middle of it all. Tadhg Lynch isn't the golden Lynch boy. He isn't the baby who got shielded from the worst, or the oldest who carved a new life with a family of his own. He's the one in between. The one who saw everything, took the blows meant for his younger brothers, and carried scars no one wanted to look too closely at. Brave. Bold. Mouthy. A joker when he can manage it. And broken enough that nothing ever really sticks. Bethany Gibson is the girl who shouldn't have lived. She was three when the water took her under, when her father gave his life to save hers. She grew up in the shadow of grief, wrapped in the protection of a brother who bled for her in ways she only half understands. Sweet, funny, too kind for her own good-Bethany knows what it is to survive, but not yet what it means to live. When Bethany collides with Tadhg at Tommen, it's fire meeting oxygen-sharp words, sharp looks, a pull neither of them can shake. He's crude, cruel with his jokes, too much for anyone to handle. She's soft where he's jagged, sunshine where he's ash. He calls her Barbie. She calls him an arsehole. And somewhere between the laughs and the fights, they start to see the cracks in each other. But fixing what's shattered isn't simple. Not when trauma festers. Not when grief never loosens its grip. Not when love means putting your hands into the fire all over again. Funny. Raw. Heartbreaking. Fixing 9 is a story about the girl who wouldn't stop caring, the boy who didn't know how to be cared for, and the brutal, beautiful mess of trying to save each other when the world already tried to burn or drown you alive.

Tadgh Lynch doesn't lose focus. He's sharp, volatile, and not here to play nice. First year at Tommen, he's already collecting enemies-and Leah Daly's at the top of the list. Leah Daly's fierce, stubborn, and hiding the kind of damage you don't talk about. She's built for survival, and Tadgh's the last person she wants anywhere near her. She hates him. He hates her. That should've been the end of it. But the more he sees, the more it looks like his history repeating itself. And once he recognises it, walking away isn't an option. Even if saving her burns him all over again.

Conor Kavanagh. The heartthrob of Tommen College. The biggest playboy in the school - cocky smirk, rugby jersey practically sewn onto him, always with a smart comment and that maddening wink. He's friendly, charming, flirty as hell. The kind of lad who'd carry your bag for you and somehow make it seem like your idea. But don't let that fool you - he's trouble. All sharp jawlines and swagger. And somehow, he's decided I'm his next bloody charity case. I hate it. I hate how he shows up when I don't ask, how he looks at me like I'm breakable. I don't need saving - I've got it sorted. The drink, the pills, the temper - all of it. My mess, not his. And every time I tell him to back off, to leave me be, he just gets closer, like I'm speaking in code. I don't need his pity or his perfect face. I don't need him. So why does part of me keep hoping he'll show up again tomorrow? *** Sinead Biggs. The reigning queen of Tommen. Sharp-tongued, sharp-eyed, and terrifying in heels. Everyone thinks she's just Cath's little sister - until she opens her gob and makes half the school cry before lunch. She walks those halls like she owns them, and honestly? She kind of does. The lads are scared of her. The girls want to be her. And me? I'm hopelessly, pathetically into her. Everyone knows it. My mates won't shut up about it. Even when she's tearing strips off me with that mouth of hers, I'm there grinning like a gobshite. Because deep down, I remember. I remember when we used to be best friends. When she used to laugh like a lunatic at my stupid jokes, when her hand would brush mine and neither of us would move away. But then came Owen Rice - the prick. Then came that night. The accident. The hospital. And when she came back, she wasn't the same. She'd built up walls with barbed wire. She'd become someone colder, louder, crueler. But I still see her. The girl I knew. And every once in a while, when no one's looking, I think she sees me too.

He didn't believe in second chances. She didn't believe in people. Tadgh Lynch had spent most of his life angry. Angry at his father. Angry at himself. Angry at a world that didn't stop burning even after everything he loved had already gone up in smoke. Now sixteen, living under someone else's roof, wearing the number 11 stitched into the back of his jersey, he was still trying to outrun a ghost with his mother's eyes and a monster's voice. Everyone in Tommen knew who he was - the hothead with a rugby number and a bruised knuckle, the smile that meant trouble, the boy who never stayed long enough to get hurt. Flora Feely? She didn't care. Quiet, awkward, sharp as broken glass when she spoke, Flora had mastered the art of staying unnoticed. It was easier that way. People couldn't leave if they never really saw you. And she was tired - tired of silence in her house, tired of being Patrick Feely's little sister, tired of pretending her heart hadn't gone cold the day her father walked out and her mam didn't ask him to stay. She didn't plan on noticing Tadgh Lynch. He didn't plan on needing her. But sometimes the fire in you recognizes the fire in someone else - and it doesn't matter how much you try to smother it. It burns anyway.

Tadhg Lynch has always been a fighter: on the pitch, in petty school fights, and against the demons that won't let him rest. But some battles can't be won with fists. His temper is burning bridges faster than he can build them, and for the first time, he isn't sure if he cares enough to extinguish it. Jade Lordan has spent years outrunning her own reality, pushing herself past every limit to prove to herself, to others, and to no one in particular, that she's in control. But control is slipping through her fingers faster than she wants to admit. They shouldn't make sense together. She's discipline and determination; he's recklessness and self-destruction. But when their worlds intertwine, neither can seem to untangle themselves. And maybe they don't want to. ੈ✩‧₊˚ [BASED ON THE BOYS OF TOMMEN SERIES BY CHLOE WALSH]