Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
Blinding violet light burst from her chest, spreading through the runes across the chamber like wildfire. The stone cracked beneath her. The walls splintered. The figure vanished.
And then-
Stillness.
When the light faded, the girl’s body was gone.
Just ash.
And I was left alone in the chamber, shaking, weeping, trying to hold onto something that didn’t belong to me.
But the pain did.
That was mine.
I collapsed to my knees beside the altar.
* 24 May
And whispered her name again.
“Serina.”
My eyes flew open with a gasp.
Not the usual disoriented, breathless kind. This was deeper. Ripping. Like waking from a death I hadn’t known I was living.
I sat up.
The others weren’t in the tent. Morning hadn’t broken. The fire in the brazier still flickered low.
My hands shook as I reached for the nearest thing-a slate of stone propped beside the cot. I dragged my fingertip across the surface, magic humming beneath my skin, and began to carve.
One letter at a time.
I didn’t stop until the name was glowing.
The sigils pulsed beneath it.
Not flame.
Not healing.
Something in between.
I was still staring at it when Eva slipped into the tent, her face drawn with fatigue and curiosity.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked gently.
“I dreamed.”
She walked closer. Her eyes caught the glow.
And her breath caught too.
“Jiselle… where did you hear that name?”
My throat felt raw. “In a ruin I’ve never seen. I wore a dress that wasn’t mine. I held the hand of a child marked like me.”
Eva stared at me. “That’s impossible.”
“I know.”
“No.” She crouched beside me. “That name-it’s in Bastain’s scrolls. Serina was…she was the last wolf born with veil-aligned flame. Before the rise of the Council. Before the Gate closed.”
My heart pounded. “She was real?”
“She was a myth,” Eva said softly. “A warning. They said she was too powerful. That she drew the attention of things we weren’t meant to wake”
“She didn’t survive.”
“No.”
I looked down at the stone. “But I remember dying with her.”
Eva didn’t speak.
Neither did I.
Because I wasn’t sure I could tell her the rest.
That I didn’t just watch Serina die.
I felt it.
The fire in her chest.
The blade in her ribs.
The weight of a fate too big for a child.
And somehow-I remembered the sound her soul made when it left her body.
A sound that still echoed behind my own ribs like it hadn’t finished falling.
“Nathaniel’
The weight of what we weren’t saying pressed thicker than the early morning mist.
Max stood across from me just beyond the camp’s outer ring, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, shoulders squared but tense-too still for someone pretending to be calm. The trees around us swayed with the wind, but he didn’t move. Neither did I.
We hadn’t said a word yet.
But the silence was a language we both spoke fluently.
I didn’t ask him to follow me out here. He’d sensed it-the pull in the air, the subtle shift when something needed to be dealt with outside the sight of others. We always knew when we were heading toward a fight. Even now, with everything burning down around us and Jiselle barely stitched back together, we were the same two wolves circling the same old wound.
Only this time, it was worse.
Because this time, it wasn’t just pride or territory between us,
It was her.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Max said first, voice quiet but edged like a blade dulled by too many hits. “And I’m not interested in doing this.”
“You’re going to,” I said. “Because I am.”
His jaw twitched. “That so?”
“You stood over her when she couldn’t defend herself,” I said. “You burned a mark into her skin because you couldn’t stand the idea of someone else getting there first.”
His eyes darkened. “Don’t start-“
“You’re right,” I cut in. “We’ve already started. The day you broke the bond she didn’t ask for, and I let her carry the one we were both too scared to speak aloud. That’s where it started.”
Max turned his head slightly, but he didn’t look away. “You think you’ve always been the better man, don’t you?”
“I think I never tried to own her.”
He flinched at that-barely-but enough.
“She’s different now,” I said. “Changed. And we’re all walking around pretending we know how to handle it.”
“Do you?”
“No.” I exhaled. “But I’m trying. I’m here.”
Max’s voice dropped. “So am I.”
I stepped forward, just enough to close the distance that made honesty too easy to dodge.
“Do you still love her?”
The question landed between us like thunder-quiet, but impossible to ignore.
Max didn’t look at me. For a second, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then, quietly, like it wasn’t for me at all: “Yeah.”
It wasn’t defiant. It wasn’t even apologetic. It just was.
“But it doesn’t matter anymore,” he added. “Because she’s not just Jiselle.”
“She’s still her.”
“She’s also something else.” He finally looked at me again. “And if you can’t hold her together, Morningstar… I will.”
We didn’t move. We didn’t speak. But everything between us snapped taut like it always did-rivalry wound around memory, guilt twisted into protection, love warped into something sharper.
The ground beneath us pulsed.
We both felt it.
Max’s eyes flicked toward the camp. “That’s her.”
I turned before he could say more, running fast enough to split wind. The trees blurred. Magic tingled along my spine like the air itself was warning me. When I broke through the clearing, I saw it instantly.
Jiselle stood at the center of the field, barefoot, her eyes wide with confusion. Flame coiled up her arms-violet, not gold-rising in steady waves, not out of aggression, but instability. Like something had slipped loose while she slept, and now it was rising.
Eva knelt nearby, hands splayed against the earth, trying to anchor the surge.
Ethan was at Jiselle’s side, his hands out, not touching her but close enough to catch her if she dropped.
She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t speaking. But her magic-gods, her magic was calling.
Not outward like an explosion. Not inward like collapse.
Calling.
A low, pulsing hum that vibrated not through the air, but through everything. Through the soil, the light, the very breath of the world. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t fear. It was summoning.
But summoning what-I didn’t know.
Not until I felt it.
The bond.
It didn’t thrum like it had before-didn’t simply tug at my ribs or ache behind my sternum like an old wound reopened.
It reached.
Toward me.
Through me.
A pull that wasn’t physical, but intimate, and ancient in a way I couldn’t define. I staggered where I stood, knees bending slightly under the pr from pain, but from sheer weight. It was like standing in the heart of a storm that hadn’t broken yet, every molecule vibrating with something me, than her, than anything we’d touched before.
The tether that once tied us soul-to-soul-a bond we’d both ignored, scarred, and buried-was moving. not than
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