Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
I read it again.
Then again.
“Summoned,” I repeated.
“Serina believed the Hollow-Born weren’t a people,” Eva said. “They were an infection. A hunger, Intelligent, but not alive in the way we understand it They don’t need to be born. They only need a door.”
My stomach twisted. “And I’m the door.”
Eva didn’t deny it.
“The child, maybe,” she said. “But Serina wasn’t clear. The entries are… fragmented. She feared that when the Ethereal and the Veil-born bloodlines merged, something would awaken. Something old. Something patient.”
“Why didn’t Bastain say anything?”
“He didn’t have the journal. She hid it in a place only another female Ethereal could find.”
The words hit me like ice.
I stepped back, clutching the book to my chest. My mind was reeling, spinning between the flicker of the dreams, the pull in my chest, the burn beneath Nate’s skin.
“We need to tell them,” I said. “Ethan. Nate. Bastain.”
Eva nodded.
“But there’s something else you need to see first.”
We didn’t go far. Just to the edge of the crater where the Gate had collapsed. The ground there had been scorched clean, but now it pulsed with faint lines of silver and black, like something had been branded into the dirt and left to cool.
“It’s a sigil,” Eva said. “Same one you drew.”.
It spread in a spiral, looping outward from the center like a flower unfolding in reverse. I stared at it, the hum in my blood quickening.
“You didn’t make this?”
“No one did. It appeared the morning after the rogue
I stepped into the center of it. djed.”
The moment I did, the air shifted. Not violently. Not loudly. But every tree, every stone, every piece of shattered ruin listened.
And something beneath the earth stirred.
By midday, we had gathered everyone. Ethan, Nate. Bastain. Even Lincoln and Eric, who had returned to help guard the perimeter. The mood was tense. Everyone could feel the shift in the leyline, even if they didn’t have words for it.
I laid the journal on the table. Opened to the final page.
Eva read aloud:
She will not be born. She will be returned. She will not cry. She will remember. And the Hollow will come to kiss her name.
A silence fell over the room.
Nate reached for my hand.
Bastain was pale. His mouth opened once, then closed again.
“So what are we saying?” Ethan asked, voice low. “That Jiselle’s child… isn’t a child at all?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I only know that I love it. And whatever it is, it chose me to carry it. Maybe as a weapon. Maybe as a hope. But it’s mine.
No one argued.
They couldn’t.
That night, as I walked the edge of the courtyard alone, a figure emerged from the trees.
He was tall. Hooded. Wrapped in dark robes marked with the symbol I had drawn.
He didn’t bow. Didn’t speak. Just held out a small, palm-sized mirror etched in obsidian and moonstone.
When I took it, his voice finally broke the silence.
“Sovereign of Smoke,” he said, “we’ve been waiting.”
*Jiselle*
The mirror felt heavier than it should have. It was small enough to fit in my palm, no bigger than a dagger blade, but it pulsed with a weight I couldn’t explain. Its frame was carved obsidian, etched with runes that glowed faintly in the cavern light, threaded with lines of moonstone like veins under pale skin. The surface wasn’t glass-not truly. It shimmered, liquid and dark, as if it held not reflection, but memory.
The trader who handed it to me had vanished the moment my fingers touched it. No scent. No sound, One blink, and the space where he’d stood was empty. Even the moss near the entrance of the cavern had gone still, like the presence of that man-or whatever he was-had temporarily unsettled the life here.
I stood in the center of the cavern for a long time, staring down at the mirror, feeling the hum of it vibrate through my bones. Nate hadn’t returned yet from the far ridge where he’d gone with Bastain to reinforce the outer boundary spells. I was alone, and I didn’t want to be. Not this time. But I couldn’t wait either. The mirror pulsed again, and this time I knew it was calling to me.
I stepped toward the spring-that quiet pool we always came back to-and knelt beside it. The stones there were still warm from the leyline beneath the surface. The water shimmered faintly. Everything inside me buzzed.
I lifted the mirror.
Took a slow breath.
And looked.
At first, I saw only darkness. Then… light began to bloom inside the glass. Not my reflection. Not even close. What stared back at me was taller than I was, more fluid in shape, more flame than flesh. Its eyes were not green-they were galaxies. Starbursts of violet and silver. Its skin shimmered like obsidian glass, edges rippling, breaking and forming again with each breath it didn’t take.
It was beautiful.
And terrifying.
And I knew.
It was the child.
Not an infant. Not a babe swaddled in cloth and moonlight. It was the essence of what I carried, rendered in divine shadow. A being of promise and destruction, wrapped in ancient will and pulsing silence. It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to.
Because I felt everything it wanted to say inside me.
The Gate didn’t close. I did.
I dropped the mirror.
It hit the stone floor with a sharp clatter, rolling once before settling at the edge of the spring. I backed away, breath shuddering, hand pressed over my chest like that might contain the scream clawing its way up my throat.
My knees gave out. I sank to the floor, shaking. Not from pain. From realization.
I was never meant to survive this.
I was the Sovereign of Smoke.
And smoke, by its nature, is what’s left after/something burns.
I don’t know how long I sat there.
I only moved when I heard boots on stone. Nate. His footsteps slowed as he neared, and I knew the exact moment he saw me. His breath caught ( crouched beside me in a heartbeat, hands on my shoulders, then cradling my face.
“Jis? What happened? What did you see?”
I couldn’t answer.
I pressed my forehead against his collarbone, trembling. He didn’t push. Just wrapped me in his arms and held me there. The mirror lay between us and the spring, untouched. But I could feel its presence. Still humming. Still waiting.
“It wasn’t me,” I whispered eventually. “It was them. The child. But not like a child. Like something that remembers fire. Like something that was fire
He stroked my hair, grounding me with slow breaths.
“They looked back at me, Nate. Like they’d already seen the end of all this. Like they knew what I would choose before I did. Like I’m not just carrying them, I’m carrying what comes after.”
He didn’t respond immediately. I felt him inhale, slow and deliberate, before he eased me back enough to look into my eyes.
“Then we choose together.”
I searched his face. “What if choosing them means losing myself?”
He framed my face with both hands. “Then I’ll burn too.”
The words dropped like an anchor.
He didn’t mean them in despair. He meant them as devotion. As defiance. As the clearest promise he could make: that no matter how deep this went, how far it dragged us into ancient truths and flame-slick futures, he would not leave me to walk it alone.
My chest ached.
Not from fear.
From love.
I leaned into him and kissed him. Not for comfort. For connection. For clarity. He kissed me back like I was the last thing keeping him human. Like I was more than a prophecy, more than a gate, more than the fire blooming inside me.
We didn’t speak after that. Words had done all they could.
We undressed each other slowly, not with hunger, but reverence. Every brush of skin was a prayer. Every sigh a confession. He laid me down near the spring, where the heat of the leyline met the cool air of the cavern. His body folded around mine like a shield, like a vow.
And in that space, we didn’t make love.
We became it.
It wasn’t about the rush of sensation or the frantic burn of desperate limbs. It was steady. Powerful. A slow, aching union of soul and body. His mouth mapped promises over my skin. My hands tangled in his hair like anchors. He moved inside me like he had nowhere else to be, like the world could end around us and he wouldn’t look away.
And maybe it did.
Maybe the world ended.
And restarted with every beat of our hearts.
When we collapsed into stillness, his arms wrapped tightly around me, I rested my ear over his chest and listened to the rhythm there, Strong
Familiar.
His thumb traced circles on my back. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to.
For the first time since the Gate collapsed, I slept..
When I woke, the air had changed.
It was hotter. Thicker. And I couldn’t move.
Not because I was restrained. But because my body was trembling, slick with sweat, and something beneath my skin was glowing.
Nate stirred beside me.
“Jiselle?”
My breath caught. I sat up, the blanket falling away, revealing the skin of my abdomen. The light beneath it pulsed.
Not golden.
Not silver.
But violet.
The rune-the one seared into Nate’s palm-was now glowing through my skin, mirroring his exactly. My veins shimmered faintly, like starlight had bee poured into them.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
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