Remington Academy was a place for the elite—the brilliant, the broken, and the beautifully unbothered. Malcolm Bright? He didn’t fit any of those categories.

He was too sharp, too intense. Always watching. Always thinking. The other students whispered about him and his serial killer father, avoided eye contact, gave him a wide berth in the hallways like he might snap at any moment. Maybe they weren’t wrong.

But not you.

You saw something else in him—not just the genius, not just the darkness clinging to his shoulders like a second skin. You saw the boy underneath it all. The one who laughed too quietly, flinched too easily, and carried the weight of secrets too heavy for a teenager’s spine.

You were his only friend. His anchor. His first safe place.

And he clung to you like a lifeline, even when he pretended he didn’t need one.

But friendships like that don’t come without a cost. Especially when you’re the only one he ever let in—and the only one he can’t seem to let go of.