Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
And I… I couldn’t stop watching her.
She hadn’t asked me to stay. She hadn’t needed to. I wouldn’t have left anyway. But the longer the silence stretched, the more something inside me began to fray. Not from her. From myself. From the ache building in my chest. The burn beneath my skin.
I stood and left quietly.
Not because I wanted space.
But because I needed answers.
Bastain’s quarters had always been an odd hybrid of scholar and soldier. Half the room looked like a library torn from a forgotten temple. The other half was war-beaten steel and tactical maps.
He looked like hell.
Bandages wrapped his torso beneath a loose black tunic. His hair, usually slicked back with meticulous pride, hung loose over his brow, streaked with ash and blood. He didn’t look surprised to see me.
“You heard,” I said.
He nodded once, not looking up from the scroll he was studying. How he knew? I had no idea. But I didn’t question it.
I paced.
“You knew this was possible. Didn’t you?”
–
“Possible?” He gave a low laugh. “Barely. You and Jiselle are anomalies, Morningstar. Creatures that should not coexist in the same bloodline, let alone…”
“Create life. I know. But we’re mates. Wouldn’t this be possible?”
He looked at me then. “Veilborn blood has always been bound to rupture then pop up again in another century or so. And with Maximus dead, you’re the only moving veilborn left in your generation. And the Ethereal… it was never meant to carry. Or so we thought. But they were always hunted and killed before they could even try.”
I pressed my palm to the wall beside me, grounding myself. The cold seeped into my skin but did nothing to calm the shaking underne
“So what does this mean? For her? For the child?”
Bastain rose slowly, crossing the room to a tall cabinet sealed with multiple wards. He broke the first with a touch of his fingers. The second required a drop of blood. When the final seal cracked open, he retrieved a thin, timeworn scroll wrapped in deep violet cloth.
“Serina wrote of this. Not directly. But in echoes.”
He unrolled a section carefully, the parchment so fragile it looked like it might disintegrate in air,
“She called it the ‘Womb of Convergence. A moment in time when two forces not meant to mix collide within a single vessel. And what comes from it… always disregarded it, as I never knew what to do with it. But you and Jiselle always find a way to amaze me.
He met my eyes, and I saw something there I hadn’t seen in him before.
Doubt.
“This child could be the tether,” he said. “Or the fuse.”
The words rang in my ears. Tether. Fuse. One meant salvation. The other, detonation.
I clenched my jaw. “You’re saying this child could destroy her. Or destroy everything.”
“I’m saying we don’t know what this child will be.” He gestured to the scroll. “But if Serina feared it enough to write in riddles… it means it’s not just prophecy. It’s warning.”
I took a breath. It burned.
Bastain closed the scroll again and pressed it into my hands. “It was meant for her. But I think it speaks more of your line than hers. You’ll understand why.”
By the time I returned to the infirmary, the sky had darkened. Shadows stretched long across the academy’s battered halls, and the scent of ash still clung to the stones. I paused before the door. Something told me not to walk in yet. Not until I was ready.
I heard movement. Then a sound that didn’t belong.
A low gasp. Not pain. Not surprise. Something worse.
Fear.
I pushed the door open.
Jiselle stood in the middle of the room, her back arched slightly, one hand gripping the edge of the bed, the other clutched over her abdomen.
Her eyes were wide. Distant. Locked onto something only she could see.
“Jiselle?”
She didn’t hear me. crossed the space in three strides, catching her shoulders before she could fall. Her body was ice beneath my palms, but her skin radiated heat. A contradiction I didn’t understand.
“Hey. Hey, look at me. Breathe.”
Her lashes fluttered. “They were burning.”
I swallowed. “Who?”
She looked past me. Through me. “All of them. The field was full of blindfolded wolves. And they were burning from the inside out.”
My grip tightened. “It was a vision.”
She nodded slowly. “But not like the others. I felt it. Their pain. Their screams. It wasn’t just a warning. It was a memory.”
“Not yours.”
“No.” Her voice cracked. “Hers.”
The hair on my neck lifted.
“The child.”
She nodded once.
“But how? She’s not even born yet!”
I pulled her close then, pressing my forehead to hers. Her breath was shallow. My arms wrapped around her, pulling her to my chest. I felt the thrum of something inside her. Not malevolent. Not pure either. A presence.
“We need to tell Eva. And Ethan.”
She leaned into me. “We will.”
That night, I sat in one of the abandoned reading chambers just down the hall. Scrolls scattered the table. Bastain’s words looped in my mind. Tether or fuse.
What if I’d cursed her by loving her?
My hands shook as I unwrapped the scroll. Serina’s seal was unlike anything I’d seen before. Not wax. Not ink. But woven threads of light, preserved in binding salt.
I broke it.
The scroll unfurled in symbols I didn’t recognize at first. Then, slowly, they began to shift. Rearranging. Forming words I could understand. Language lost to time, but remembered by blood.
When fire and veil meet beneath a sovereign moon,
A spark shall awaken what the Gate could not seal.
Neither curse nor gift,
It shall walk between,
A child of balance undone. read the lines again.
And again.
Balance. Undone.
I pressed my fingers to the parchment, tracing the faint etchings.
Jiselle was strong. Fierce. Braver than anyone I’d ever known.
But could she survive what was growing inside her?
And if not-
Would I have the strength to stop what came after?
I didn’t sleep that night.
The scroll lay open before me, glowing faintly with the fire of something ancient.
Something watching.
And in the quiet, where hope once tried to live, only one thing remained.
The burn beneath my skin.
“Ethan
Grief didn’t come with fire. It didn’t scream. It didn’t rage.
It came in the quiet.
In the soft brush of wind over scorched earth, in the way ash clung to fingertips long after you’d wiped your hands clean. It came when everyone else had tumed their backs, when the last shovel had packed the last mound of dirt, and still-your chest ached like something inside you hadn’t caught up yet.
Max was dead.
And there wasn’t enough anger left in me to hate him. anymore.
The sun hadn’t fully risen. The courtyard was gray and pale, lit only by the flicker of dying torches and the glowing silver fire that marked the edge of the Gatekeeper circle. I stood over the unlit pyre. Refused every hand that tried to help me build it. It had to be me.
Max’s wolf tag sat heavy in my palm, the metal etched with the twin spirals of the Veilborn mark. It was scorched, a little warped from flame, but still intact. Still his.
No body. Not really. The fire had claimed him before we could. But this… this would have to be enough.
I heard footsteps behind me, soft, hesitant.
“Ethan?”
Eva.
She didn’t come closer. She lingered at the edge of the courtyard, hands clasped in front of her, a long coat draped over her shoulders despite the heat. Her eyes looked hollow. And beneath that… something else. Something I hadn’t noticed before.
Grief.
Real, sharp grief. The kind that built slowly and settled in your bones like a second skeleton.
“You should rest,” I said, not turning.
“So should you.”
A pause. Then the sound of her boots on stone as she walked to the edge of the pyre.
“You’re not the only one who lost him,” she said softly.
I looked at her then. Really looked. And realized just how much she’d been holding inside.
“He was my brother,” she added. “Even if he’d lost himself.”
I swallowed hard, my throat raw.
“He made a lot of mistakes.”
“So have all of us.”
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
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