Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
Nate scrambled up, eyes wide. He reached for my hand, for my stomach, for me.
“What is that?”
I couldn’t answer.
I felt the leyline beneath the cavern begin to rise.
Its rhythm matched the pulsing glow in my abdomen. Each beat was an echo. Each pulse a signal.
Something had been triggered.
And whatever the mirror had shown me-whatever I had carried into the dark with open arms-was no longer content to sleep.
It was becoming.
And I was becoming with it.
*Jiselle*
The heat didn’t fade. It rolled through me in waves, thick and electric, until my breath came ragged and my skin felt too small to hold what was happening beneath it. The violet glow shimmered beneath my abdomen, each pulse syncing with something deeper-the leyline under the cavern floor. It wasn’t just me anymore. The ground, the air, the magic in this place… it all beat with the same rhythm. My rhythm. Or theirs.
Nate held me upright, one arm wrapped tight around my back, his other hand hovering over the glowing rune like he could force it to stop by sheer will could hear the frantic edge of his breathing against my ear, could feel the tremor in his arms, but his voice stayed steady when he finally spoke..
“I’m here. I’ve got you. Just hold on to me.”
I clutched his shirt, nails biting through the fabric. It wasn’t pain coursing through me-not entirely. It was becoming. Something vast and endless moving beneath my skin, stretching, claiming space it had been waiting for. My thoughts spiraled: Was this what motherhood was meant to feel like? Or was this the Hollow-Born infection Eva feared, bloorning where a child should have been?
A thunderous hum rattled the cavern walls. The leyline swelled, each beat echoing through my bones. A shimmer of silver dust rose from the stone floor, caught in a spiral of unseen wind. I swore the cavern whispered my name-but not mine. Something close. Something older. Something waiting to be born from the syllables.
Nate swore under his breath. “I’m getting Bastain.”
I shook my head sharply, gripping him tighter. “Don’t leave.”
He hesitated for only a second before yelling for help, his voice carrying like a command to the air itself. Moments later, footsteps thundered in the distance. Bastain arrived first, robes disheveled, his face pale as his eyes fell on the rune glowing violently through my skin.
Behind him came Ethan, wide-eyed and tense, followed by Eva who froze near the entrance, her breath hitching as though she had seen this before. Or dreamed it.
“First awakening,” Bastain whispered. “Sovereign Key.”
I tried to speak but my throat tightened, choked by the hum of power. The rune on my skin burned brighter, violet flaring toward white at the edges. It wasn’t mine. It was theirs. A calling card, a declaration. Something alive in my womb announcing itself to the world.
Eva stumbled closer, her eyes glassy with a distant light. “Don’t answer,” she breathed. “Whatever you hear, don’t answer. It’s trying to name itself. If you give it your voice, you give it the door.”
A sound curled at the edge of my mind then. Soft. Gentle. Almost sweet. Like a child’s laugh tangled in a whisper. It stretched syllables I almost recognized, shaping them like clay, tugging at me to repeat them. I clamped my lips shut, shaking my head violently as tears blurred my vision. My own instincts screamed to answer, to comfort this thing inside me begging to be known.
Nate’s hand tightened on mine, grounding me like an anchor in a violent storm, “Stay with me, Jis. Don’t let it take you.”
The rune seared fully into my skin, the heat spilling up my chest like molten gold. I arched forward with a broken sound, feeling the magic bite into flesh and bone, carving itself permanent. The leyline beneath the cavern roared to life, a low, thrumming pulse that matched the glow now burning steady on my abdomen.
The pulse grew stronger, each beat sending tremors through the floor, shaking pebbles loose from the cavern ceiling. My breath came in short, panicked gasps, tears streaming down my cheeks as I clung to Nate like he was the only thing tethering me to this world. The hum built into a low, resonant chant in my bones, like countless unseen voices were calling not just to me, but to the being inside me.
Bastain stepped closer, his hands weaving spells in the air, sigils glowing briefly before flickering out as if something more powerful devoured them. “This is no ordinary surge,” he muttered. “It’s a claim. The leytine recognizes it, bends to it.”
Ethan’s fists clenched, torn between fear and rage. “And we’re just standing here letting it happen?”
“What do you want me to do?” Bastain snapped, sweat beading his brow. “This power is older than anything I can counter. It’s choosing its place in the world?
Eva’s eyes darted between me and the glowing rune, terror and awe battling in her expression. “Jiselle, keep fighting it Hold on to yourself.
The whispers grew louder. Not words I knew, but sounds that curved into meaning deep in my gut. Names forming like smoke, trying to coax my lips to shape them. My mouth trembled, every instinct aching to respond. To know the thing I carried. To give it what it wanted most: a name.
But Nate’s grip tightened, his forehead pressing against mine, his voice a growl of raw devotion. “No. Don’t let it in. Whatever it wants, it doesn’t get you.
Not like this.”
I clung to his voice, repeating his words in my mind until they drowned out the call. My tears burned hot, my body shaking as if resisting gravity itself. And then-suddenly-the rune flared one last time, blindingly bright, before dimming to a low, steady glow. The cavern fell silent except for the ragged gasps of breath filling the air.
For a heartbeat, I thought it was over.
Then a whisper slipped through, clearer than before, curling through my mind like smoke and ash:
“Sovereign… open the door.”
And I knew this wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of something that would tear the world open.
Jiselle
The whisper still echoed in my mind.
Sovereign… open the door.
The words hadn’t been spoken aloud, yet they filled the cavern like smoke that couldn’t be seen but clung to everything. They pulsed behind my eyes, wrapping around my heartbeat, shaping the air in my lungs. I sat in silence, legs drawn to my chest, the rune still glowing beneath my skin, dimmer now but no less present. Nate sat across from me, hands folded tight, trying not to look afraid.
But he was. They all were.
Bastain paced slowly around us, the edges of his robes brushing the stone with each step. His expression was unreadable, but his magic was on edge. I could feel it like static. Ethan leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, face like granite but jaw twitching with tension. And Eva… she hadn’t moved at all. She sat curted near the base of the spring, staring at the floor, her fingers twitching now and then like she was still inside a vision she couldn’t escape.
No one spoke. Not yet. Not after what I’d heard.
Because we all knew-something had responded to me. Not to my words, but to the fire inside me. And I… I almost responded back.
I closed my eyes. But the darkness was worse.
Images stirred behind my lids-flashes of ash and smoke, of wolves kneeling in fire, of a voice in a child’s shape, sitting in a throne built of bones and stars.
Then the mirror flared.
No one had touched it.
It had remained where I dropped it two nights ago, near the spring’s edge. But now its obsidian surface pulsed with violent light, like molten metal beneath ice. The air around it shimmered. And the reflection-gods, the reflection.
I gasped and scrambled backward.
Everyone turned.
In the mirror, we didn’t see ourselves. We saw something watching. Dozens of eyes. Blindfolded wolv?s, knelt in a spiral, their bodies bleeding shadow, heads bowed to something just out of view.
One lifted its head slowly. No face. Just a mouth-split and grinning.
“Enough,” Bastain said, stepping forward. He raised a hand and cast a sharp sigil of severance. Light flared. The mirror cracked, just once, down the middle. The vision vanished.
“It’s connected now,” he said, breathless. “To you. To the child. To the leyline.”
I pulled my knees tighter to my chest. “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t open anything.”
Bastain shook his head. “It doesn’t need you to. The bond was already forming. That whisper wasn’t just calling you. It was testing if you’d answer.”
Eva finally moved. She stood slowly, crossing the cavern to kneel beside me. Her eyes were rimmed red, but focused.
“We have to seal it,” she said. “Whatever is trying to come through. We have to keep it from reaching full strength.”
Bastain nodded. “We try. But she’s Sovereign now. And pregnant. The child is anchoring something ancient. This isn’t about stopping it it about surviving it.”
He knelt at the center of the room, began drawing protective sigils on the stone with silver chalk, each mark flickering faintly as he worked,
Then he looked at me. “Lie down here.”
Nate stepped between us. “What are you doing to her?”
“Not harming her,” Bastain said. “Shielding her. The rune needs to be bound, at least temporarily. If we don’t try, it might burn her from the inside out.”
I stood, slowly. “I trust him.”
Nate hesitated, jaw flexing, then stepped aside.
I lay at the center of the sigils. The stone was cool against my back, but I could feel the leyline thrum beneath it-a rhythm that wasn’t mine anymore. Bastain placed his palm just above my abdomen and began chanting.
The silver chalk glowed. The air turned thick.
Then everything exploded.
The sigils burned too bright. The rune on my skin flared in answer, violent and hungry. Bastain fell backward with a shout. The protective spell shattered I cried out, back arching as power seared through me.
And everything went black.
In the dark, I was standing.
Stone beneath my feet, burning.
A throne before me, massive and alive, crowned in fire and shrouded in smoke.
And sitting in it-the child.
Not a baby. Not even the being I saw in the mirror. lin
A figure, humanoid, glowing with a pulse like a star. Its face was shifting. Its eyes were endless. And it watched me.
“You are not the door,” it said, voice echoing from every direction. “You are the lock.”
I swallowed hard. “Then what are you?”
The figure tilted its head. “The key.”
A second later, the throne behind it cracked-a hairline fracture glowing red. Then another. The figure smiled.
“And the flame to break it.”
I gasped awake, drenched in sweat, my hands clenching the stone beneath me. The cavern spun, Nate’s face appearing above me, frantic, relieved.
“You’re okay. You’re back.”
I tried to speak, but my lips moved without my consent.
Foreign words fell from my mouth-syllables like knives, language older than anything I knew.
Eva darted forward, scribbling the sounds in chalk. Bastain, eyes wide, translated aloud as she wrote:
“The lock breaks when love names it.”
Silence followed.
I looked at Nate. He looked at me.
And we both knew what that meant.
It wasn’t just birth that would open something.
It was naming it.
It was loving it..
“So what,” Ethan said hoarsely, “we can’t even speak its name?”
Bastain turned to the wall.
A soft humming sound grew.
And then, on the cavern wall, another rune burned itself into the stone. Jagged. Deep.
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