Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
There are things you can unsee, and then there are things that bury themselves behind your eyes and stay there. The image of the dying rogue hadn’t faded, not even hours later. His voice, thin and torn, still echoed in my skull: The Hollow are listening. They heard the child stir.
It was that last word-stir-that followed me like a second shadow. I kept replaying the way his fingers gripped that bone relic like it was the last anchor to something sacred or damning. He hadn’t even looked afraid. Just… awestruck. Like he’d seen something greater than death waiting for him on the other side.
Now, the relic lay wrapped in thick black cloth, pulsing faintly with a dull, bone-deep hum. It didn’t glow. Not visibly. But I could feel it every time’1 shifted my grip, a heatless vibration pressing against my skin through the layers. Bastain had agreed to meet me in the observatory chamber, away from the others, behind stone walls lined with old sigils that hadn’t fully broken during the siege. It felt fitting-the last untouched place for the last untouched questions.
When I entered, he was already lighting the lanterns.
“You brought it,” he said without turning.
“I had to.”
He motioned to the central table. I unwrapped the cloth slowly, revealing the smooth white surface beneath. The relic was about the length of my forearm, curved slightly, carved with runes so faint they almost looked worn off by time. But as soon as the cloth was removed, the temperature of the room dropped.
Bastain approached cautiously. “Do you feel that?”
“Like the air’s folding in on itself.”
He nodded. “It predates the Gate.”
I looked at him. “How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve seen one before. Once. In a dream Serina shared with me when I first joined the Council. She called them Keys. There are only three. One was sealed into the foundation of the Gate. One was lost to the Hollow. And the last… was never found.”
“Until now.”
He reached into his robe and pulled out an old scroll, the edges crumbling with age. He laid it beside the relic and rolled it open. There-etched in the faded ink-was the exact same curve. The runes weren’t identical, but they mirrored enough to send a cold sweat down my spine.
“She said the Keys weren’t meant to open anything,” Bastain murmured. “They were meant to remember.”
“Remember what?”
He looked at me, eyes heavy. “What we tried to bury.”/
I stared at the relic. I should have waited. Asked for gloves. Built wards. But the longer I looked, the more I felt like it was pulling me toward it-or maybel was being called.
I reached out and touched it.
The pain was instant.
A white-hot line shot up my arm, blooming across my shoulder and into my chest. My lungs seized, and my knees buckled. I heard Bastain yell my name, but it was already too late.
The room vanished.
??9%
I stood in a place that wasn’t a place.
Flames danced across ? ground made of ash and bone. The sky above was not sky, but void-endless and rippling, like heat off a forge. A throne burned at the center of it all, black and gold and bleeding light. Not a seat of honor. A seat of reckoning.
Jiselle knelt before it.
Her hair was wild, tangled with soot and streaks of light. Her eyes glowed with the same silver fire I’d seen when she’d drawn the rune. She didn’t look afraid. She looked hollow. Empty. Not broken-open.
Behind her stood the child.
It wasn’t a child. Not really. It was a shape made of shifting light and smoke. Humanoid, but faceless. It radiated something ancient, something I didn’t recognize but instinctively bowed to. It placed one small hand on Jiselle’s shoulder.
Around them, wolves knelt.
Some wept. Others howled in pain. A few screamed until their throats tore open, their bodies consumed by fire that leaked from their eyes. I saw familiar faces among them. Council members. Instructors. Pack leaders. People I once thought unshakable.
One by one, they crumbled into ash.
The child looked at me.
It had no eyes. But I knew.
It saw me.
And it knew me.
I couldn’t breathe.
The flames surged forward-not to consume, but to wrap around my limbs, to anchor me. They hissed as they whispered something I couldn’t understand, but felt in my bones.
You were the first to kneel.
I fell backward, or maybe I was pulled: The vision tore away like scorched parchment in the wind.
I woke to hands on my chest and someone yelling.
My body jolted upward, and I gasped, sucking in breath like I’d been drowning. Eva knelt beside me, one hand pressed firmly against my sternum, her expression tight with fear.
“Nate! Breathe-you’re okay. You’re back. You’re okay.”
Bastain stood over us, pale and rattled. He muttered a spell under his breath, something to stabilize my nerves.
I coughed, trembling. My chest burned.
“What happened?” Eva asked.”
“I saw it,” I rasped. “All of it. The throne. Jiselle. The child. The wolves-they were kneeling or dying.”
“You touched it, didn’t you?” Bastain snapped, “Idiot. I should’ve warned you that it wasn’t inert.”
I barely heard him.
I looked down at my right hand.
The rune was burned into my palm.
Not drawn. Not glowing. Branded.
Eva leaned closer, her eyes widening. “That’s the same symbol Jiselle drew. It’s the one the dying rogue carried.”
I clenched my hand into a fist. It ached. Like fire wanted out.
“You said Serina called them Keys,” I said. “Keys remember. What does this mean?”
Bastain looked grim. “It means something remembers you.”
We returned to the infirmary wing just before nightfall. Jiselle was asleep, curled beneath layers of blankets, her hair fanned out across the pillow like fire frozen mid-motion. Her breathing was soft. Peaceful.
But the room was hot.
Too hot.
Eva paused at the threshold. “Is it just me, or is the air… pulsing?”
I walked to the side of the bed. My palm still throbbed.
Jiselle shifted slightly. Then again.
A wave of heat rolled off her body-invisible but unmistakable. It shimmered through the room, brushing the walls, making the sigils drawn into the infirmary stones hum faintly.
Then another pulse.
Stronger.
I looked down at her, and for the briefest second, I swore the glow beneath her skin flickered in time with the vibrations beneath my feet.
The leyline.
It was syncing with her.
Or with what she carried.
Eva met my eyes.
Neither of us spoke.
Because there was nothing left to say.
Something had awakened beneath the flames.
And now, it was listening.
Jiselle
It was still dark when I woke, but not with sleep in my bones. I was trembling. Not from cold, not from pain from knowing. A knowing that i couldn’t name or reason with, only feel like a pressure behind my eyes and beneath my ribs, like something alive inside me was beginning to stretch. Like it had waited long enough.
The air around me thrummed. Not in a physical way there was no sound, no tangible shift. But it was there. Every breath I took seemed to pull the world closer, and when I exhaled, it pushed back. Like the leyline that ran beneath the academy had stopped whispering to me and had begun to listen through me.
I sat up slowly, careful not to wake Nate. His chest rose and fell steadily beside me, one arm still draped over my waist. There were faint beads of sweat at his temple, and the lines around his mouth were tight even in sleep. He v
Was dreaming again. Maybe the same dream that had woken him screaming hours before. Maybe something worse.
I pulled away gently and stood, wrapping one of his shirts around me as I padded toward the small altar at the back of the cavern-a stone outcrop Eva and I had started using for scrollwork and safe study when the infirmary walls felt too thin. I lit a small oil lamp, shielding the flame with my hand as it flickered to life. The warmth didn’t soothe me.
The charcoal sketch I’d drawn the day before was still there, and as I looked down at it, I realized the lines had changed.
No one had touched it. No one could have.
But the symbol had deepened, the curves more exact, the script sharper. Hollow-Born. Unseen return. That’s what Eva had called it. I hadn’t meant to draw it, but my hand had moved on its own. Now it looked etched rather than sketched-like the page had absorbed the truth and hardened around it.
I traced the edges, and the symbol responded. A pulse of heat coiled up my fingertips, not painful, but deliberate. The same sensation I’d felt in the dreams-like being watched from the inside.
I should have been afraid.
I wasn’t.
I was angry.
Not at the child. Not at Nate. At the world that kept twisting around us with new names for ancient monsters and prophecies no one understood until it was too late. I was done being a vessel for secrets. If this power lived in me, then I would use it.
I called for Eva.
She came groggy but alert, her braid loose and eyes already scanning the walls like she expected runes to be bleeding from the stones.
“I need to know what you haven’t told me,” I said. “About the Hollow-Born.”
She blinked. “I told you everything I saw.”
“Not everything you read. You said Serina had notes in her locked journals-notes about Hollow-Born script. What else did she leave behind?”
Eva hesitated.
I stepped closer. “Please. If I’m going
Sto protect this child-if any of us are-I need to know what we’re fighting against.”
She sighed and moved toward the shelf she’d built from salvaged stone. From behind a loose slab, she pulled out a worn leather-bound book, half- melted at the corners. She handed it to me, her voice low.
“Serina only referenced the Hollow-Born three times in all her writings. Once in theory. Once in prophecy. And once in warning.
I opened to the first marked page. The script was dense, curling and precise.
They were not born of moonlight, nor made of magic. They were something else. A race cast out before language list shape, beteta tha Gala, s?o wound. They do not breed. They do not die. They exist through vessels-souls they tether and repurpose. They were sealed bryond the red bod sealed things can be summoned,
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?