Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
It was leaving a trail.
“She came through here,” Eva said, crouching to press her fingers to the earth. Her voice was low, focused. She’d changed since her recovery-still sharp, but softer in the right places. Like whatever she’d seen in her coma had stripped away the noise and left only the necessary truth.
“She didn’t just pass through,” I murmured, standing still, palms open at my sides. “She anchored.”
Eva glanced at me, frowning. “You’re sure?”
I nodded. The scar across my chest-the one that never fully healed after the bond broke-was burning again. Not like pain. Not even like longing. It pulsed. Matched the leyline beat for beat.
And then came the first vision.
It wasn’t clear. Nothing ever was. Just a flash-Jiselle, standing beneath a blackened sky, her back turned to me, her hands ablaze. Her hair was tangled with light, and when she turned, her face flickered between soft and sharp. Her eyes shifted- warm, then cold, then full of tears that steamed before they fell.
I blinked and staggered back.
Eva caught me. “You saw her?”
“I think so.”
She didn’t ask what I meant. She didn’t need to.
The next wave came harder.
This time it wasn’t fire.
It was laughter.
Her laugh.
Real. Breathless. The kind that used to unmake me from the inside out.
But then it twisted. Warped.
In the next flash, her voice was screaming-not in fear, but in rage. The trees around her bent backward from the force of it.
A crater burned into the earth beneath her feet. And in her hand, she held a blade I couldn’t name.
“I don’t know what’s real,” I whispered.
Eva stepped beside me. “She doesn’t either.”
That stopped me cold.
“You saw something,” I said.
Eva didn’t deny it. “During the coma. While everything around me was dying, I saw her. Not her body. Not even her soul. Her choice.”
She sat down on the flat stone and stared at the cliffside like it held the rest of the story.
“She stood between two paths,” she said. “One was scorched earth. Ash, ruin, the remnants of wolves who knelt and were forgotten. The other was lined with light-but cold. Controlled. Lifeless. Like a truth that was too clean to believe in.”
“And?”
“She didn’t choose.”
MPACT 103
I knelt next to her.
“She didn’t even look down either path,” Eva continued. “She looked up. And then the space beneath her feet cracked. She started burning her own trail”
I exhaled through my nose, the ache in my chest tightening.
“She’s rejecting all of it,” I said.
“She’s terrified of becoming what they want her to be. So she’s trying to become something no one can define”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Or stop.”
We didn’t speak for a while..
The leyline flared again, and this time, it hurt.
I gasped, and Eva gripped my arm as I pitched forward. Images cascaded through me like glass shatterings
-Jiselle as a child, curled up beside Ethan in a sunlit clearing.
-Jiselle pressed to my chest in the rain, saying don’t let go yet.
-Jiselle standing in fire, her hands slick with blood, eyes blank.
I clawed my way back to the present with a shout.
Eva didn’t flinch. She just held on tighter.
When I opened my eyes again, the clearing had changed,
The runes glowed brighter now. The air had thickened. And the scar in my chest-
-it wasn’t scarring anymore.
It was pulsing.
Alive.
“I think the bond is trying to regrow,” I said.
Eva looked wary. “But the bond was severed.”
“Bonds break,” I murmured. “But scars? Scars remember. Maybe the pieces aren’t dead. Maybe they’re… changing.”
“You mean like evolving into something new?”
I met her gaze. “Exactly that.”
She didn’t speak for a long time.
Then, softly, “Do you still love her?”
The question didn’t need time.
“Yes,” I said.
“Even if she doesn’t come back the same?”
“She won’t.”
Eva looked away, but not before I saw the sadness in her expression.
“And if she doesn’t come back at all?”
I let the question hang.
I felt the answer burn beneath my ribs.
“If she’s still in there,” I said, “then I’ll find her.”
“And if she’s not?”
I swallowed.
“Then I’ll go wherever she went. Until she knows she’s not alone.”
The wind picked up around us. The leyline flared again-less violently this time.
Like it was listening.
I looked down at my palms. Faint flickers of light sparked across the lines in my skin-residue, maybe. Or the first signs of something else.
Something new.
Something tethered not by fate or mating rites or prophecy-but by memory. And choice.
The scar wasn’t healing.
It was opening.
<
…
The sanctuary’s library wasn’t a room.
It was a labyrinth.
Hidden beneath Kael’s quarters, it unfurled like roots beneath the mountain-each corridor more twisted than the last, each chamber laced with firelight and dust and secrets so old they had teeth. It wasn’t open to the others. Not even to the inner circle. Kael had told me once it was a remnant of a time before his reign, built by wolves who believed that knowledge was the truest form of control. That was the only time he ever spoke of it.
So when I used his sigil to unlock the gate and stepped inside alone, I knew exactly what I was risking.
But I needed answers.
The dreams had changed again.
They weren’t just visions anymore. They bled into my waking hours-brief flashes of symbols, names, emotions that weren’ t mine. Sometimes I felt like I was watching my own life through someone else’s eyes. I would reach for the fire and it would pull away, as if even my magic no longer trusted me to hold it without unraveling something deeper.
I needed to know why.
The first section of the archive was filled with familiar tomes-histories of rogue lineages, accounts of the early days of the rebellion, a few forbidden Council transcripts Kael had “liberated.” But deeper, beyond the walls etched in old rune- scratches, the tone of the room shifted.
The firelight dimmed.
The stone grew colder.
And the books… began to hum.
I found it in the fifth alcove-a small journal bound in cracked obsidian leather, sealed with an intricate rune I didn’t recognize. But the moment I touched it, the flame beneath my skin responded like it had found a heartbeat that matched its own.
The rune dissolved.
The book opened.
And the first word I saw was:
Veilborn.
I didn’t breathe.
The word looked simple. Sharp lines. Slender stroke. But it rippled on the page, alive with old magic. There was no explanation, no translation-just a name, and below it, a list.
I scanned it, expecting ancient titles, forgotten bloodlines.
Instead, I found three names:
Kael. Nathaniel Morningstar. Maximus Laker.
My blood turned to ice.
I sat down hard against the stone shelf, heart racing. The three most powerful wolves I had ever met. All marked with the same title. A title I had never heard before.
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