Five schools in less than four months—Natalia Lynch was setting records for all the wrong reasons.

Tommen was supposed to be different. At least, that’s what Shannon had said. Natalia wasn’t convinced. Schools were all the same in the end—new halls, new uniforms, new people who would either ignore her or push her until she snapped. The only difference was that Shannon had managed to stick it out here. But Shannon had Johnny Kavanagh. She had Claire, Lizzie, Gibsie, and the rest of them. Natalia? She had no one.

What she did have was a family that needed her. Teddy Lynch was a violent drunk, Marie was too weak to stop him, and Natalia had spent years keeping her siblings together. She had raised them, protected them, been the one to hold their world together when their parents tore it apart.

She wasn’t here to make friends. She wasn’t here to belong.

She was here because she had no other choice.

Natalia knew how to survive—on the pitch, in a fight, in a house that never felt like home. But surviving Tommen? That was a different kind of battle. And she wasn’t sure it was one she cared enough to fight.

Natalia was beautiful and rugged but in an attractive and feminine way, she has a scar on her eyebrow and one on the opposite cheekbone, the outcome of many many fights, 5”9 and towers over her little sister’s 5foot frame, her knuckles are bruised, result of the last fight that got her expelled from BCS