JUST HOLD THIS: One Bag. Favour. A Lifetime to Pay It Back.

He just wanted someone to notice he was there. Marcus is fifteen. Ordinary. Invisible in the way only a fifteen-year-old can be, the kind of boy nobody looks at twice. Until one cold September night outside a chicken shop, an older boy hands him a bag and four quiet words that will cost him everything he has: "Just hold this for me." Twenty minutes. Forty pounds. A favour small enough that saying yes barely feels like a decision at all. He's wrong. It's the only decision that will ever matter. What follows is a year Marcus never agreed to, a world run by a man who never once lies to him, and that's exactly what makes him impossible to walk away from. Honesty, it turns out, can be the sharpest weapon there is. And the debt Marcus owes doesn't stay his alone. It reaches for the people he loves most, and it doesn't ask permission first. By the time Marcus understands the true size of what he's holding, putting it down might no longer be his choice to make. JUST HOLD THIS is a raw, unflinching novel about how ordinary boys get pulled toward extraordinary danger, not through threats, but through the one thing they've never been offered before: a reason to believe they matter. It doesn't look like what you think it looks like. That's exactly why nobody sees it coming until it's already too late. A gripping, character-driven thriller for readers who want more than a crime story, who want to understand exactly how it starts, one small favour at a time.