For Joey Lynch, the world was never anything but a rotten, cruel battlefield. Born on a holiday meant for light, he was instead forged in the darkness of an abusive legacy, forced to become a protector before he was even a boy.
He is a creature of trauma and raw survival, forever battling the seductive, drowning pull of addiction that promises a final escape. But there has always been a light in the dark for him. Just a singular, defiant spark: Estella, his sister's best friend.
She is a magnificent anomaly, a walking, breathing sunbeam in his grime-coated life.
Her hair is a shock of bright, liquid silver, catching the light like spilled moonlight, framing a face that is dizzyingly, charmingly cute. Her eyes, wide and unnerving, are the colour of molten silver.When she stares up at Joey, meeting his trauma-hardened gaze with her impossible luminosity and a cheeky, uncompromising grin, he knows: she is trouble.
The necessary kind.
He has lost everything: his peace, his innocence, his stability. But she is the one thing that can never slip away. Not when he snarls and retreats like a cornered animal; she simply stares, her bright eyes unsettlingly steady, and deploys that silly, confident grin. God, he is putty in her hands.
The temptation between them is a physical, humming wire, stretched taut for years.
But when they finally give in-when the shadow reaches for the light, and the light does not pull away-things dare to take a turn for the worse.
As Joey fights his darkest demons, trying to fend off his violent father and the relentless grip of addiction, he discovers that the girl who glows has been quietly burning, too.
They need to decide if this fierce, hard-won love can genuinely tame all the anger and war within them...
... and if a single, silver light is truly the answer to all the world's rot.