Filed to story: Mated and Hated by My Brother’s Best Friend Book PDF Free by Anna Campbell
I shook out my arms. “It’s different now.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t just burn. It pulls.”
He tilted his head, studying me. “Pulls what?”
“Me. Out of myself. Like something’s trying to reach through it.”
His mouth pressed into a line. “The more your power expands, the more it connects to the echoes of those who carried it before.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You knew this would happen.”
Kael didn’t flinch. “It’s part of your evolution.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
His jaw worked, but no answer came. Instead, he motioned for me to begin again.
I didn’t.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in the stone alcove of my room, listening to the faint hum of magic in the walls, the thrum of something deeper beneath the keep-something older than the rogues who lived here. The rogue sanctuary had always felt strange to me, but now it felt haunted. Not by ghosts, but by memory. The collective history of wolves who had tried and failed to hold power like mine. The walls remembered. And now, so did I.
I woke from a half-sleep with a name on my tongue. Not mine. Not Kael’s. Someone I’d never met, yet the syllables made my hands burn as if they’d been carved into my skin.
I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I found Kael in the high library, where the rogue texts were kept under magical wards that I wasn’t yet allowed to access. He stood at a table, flipping through pages written in blood-ink, the candlelight catching on the curve of his jaw. He looked more shadow than man.
“You’re hiding something,” I said without preamble.
He looked up slowly. “Jiselle-“
“You knew this would happen. The memories. The emotions. They’re not just echoes. They’re pieces of lives. Pieces of pain. Why am I seeing them?”
Kael closed the book in front of him and leaned his weight against the table. “Because your fire doesn’t just burn forward- ‘it reaches back.”
I crossed my arms. “What does that even mean?”
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes didn’t flicker. “The Ethereal flame isn’t just energy. It’s legacy. Every bearer leaves something behind, and when the next one rises, that residue calls to them. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Sometimes… it’ s a scream.”
“Why now?”
“Because your cuffs are gone. Because the Trial cracked your boundaries. Because you’ve begun to change.”
“I didn’t ask to change,” I snapped.
“No one does.”
He stepped closer, his voice low.
“You think you’re here to heal. To rebuild. To be the light in the dark.”.
I said nothing.
Kael’s next words were soft, but they struck like blades.
“You weren’t born to fix the cycle, Jiselle.”
I went still.
He stared into me like he could see the fractures spidering beneath my skin.
“You were born to end it.”
Silence stretched between us like a chasm. My heart thudded once-twice-before the words made sense.
“End it?” I said hoarsely. “You mean… destroy it?”
“I mean sever it. Burn it down to the root, so nothing like it ever rises again.”
“Is that what you want from me?” I whispered. “To be your weapon?”
He didn’t answer. But his eyes-his eyes told me everything.
“I’m not your fire-god,” I hissed. “I’m not your prophecy.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You’re not. But you’re still the end of something.”
I left before I could decide whether to scream or cry.
That night, the whispers came back. Not voices. Not memories.
Feelings.
The terror of a young girl hunted by her own father. The sorrow of a mother forced to sever her pup’s gift to save her sanity. The fury of a boy who watched his mate be claimed by another because he wasn’t strong enough to protect her.
None of them were mine.
And yet they filled me until I thought I would break.
When the fire finally came, it didn’t burn. It sang.
And in the song, I heard something new.
A voice I knew like my own heartbeat. Familiar. Cracked. Desperate.
Jiselle…
My eyes opened in the dark. My hands shook. My magic coiled beneath my skin like a creature waking from slumber.
It wasn’t a dream.
It was Nate.
And the bond might be gone…. but the scar still bled.
*Nathaniel*
We were two days past the riverline when Bastain said we were being followed.
I had felt it too-a pressure on the back of my neck, a pattern in the silence. The birds stopped singing every time we crossed into a new clearing. The air grew heavier, like it had lungs of its own and was holding its breath. Wolves moved differently when they hunted in shadow. It wasn’t loud. It was intentional.
They weren’t rogues, not the frenzied kind. They moved with calculation. Precision. And they weren’t attacking.
They were waiting.
Bastain and I didn’t speak as we made camp that night. We didn’t need to. The silence between us had become familiar- necessary. There was no space for small talk when every step forward might be your last or lead you to hers.
Jiselle.
Her name had become a mantra in my head, less like a word and more like a heartbeat. I couldn’t feel her the way I once did. The mate bond was severed-clean or not, it no longer hummed between our souls. But there was something else, something darker and more persistent. A kind of ache that settled behind my ribs and throbbed every time I closed my eyes.
She was alive. I would have known if she wasn’t.
But that didn’t mean she was safe.
Or even still herself.
We lit no fire that night. The moon was full enough to cast silver across the tree trunks, and that was all the light we dared. Bastain sat sharpening one of his smaller knives-something he did more for rhythm than necessity-and I kept my back against a boulder, listening to the woods like it was speaking in a language only half remembered.
They came just after midnight.
Three of them.
The first was a woman with dark eyes and burn scars down her neck. She moved like a predator-slow, but not unsure. The second was tall and gaunt, his hair long enough to braid but tied back like a soldier’s. The third was hooded, his scent unfamiliar, not wolf but something altered. The kind of stench that made your magic recoil.
I rose to my feet and didn’t reach for my weapon.
They hadn’t drawn theirs.
“We don’t mean harm,” the woman said. Her voice was rough, as if unused. “We followed you because we know what you’re looking for.”
I didn’t blink. “Then say her name.”
She hesitated. “Jiselle.”
Bastain stood as well. “Who are you?”
“Former believers,” said the tall one. “Kael’s pack. Once.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why ‘once’?”
The hooded one answered this time, his voice low and clipped. “Because he stopped asking for loyalty and started demanding obedience.”
Bastain and I exchanged a look.
“We call ourselves the Wolves of the Split Moon,” the woman went on. “We were part of Kael’s original inner circle-those who helped him build the sanctuary. But we left when the experiments started.”
My blood ran cold. “Experiments?”
She nodded. “He never said it outright. But we knew. Wolves went in to be ‘awakened.’ Most didn’t come back. The ones who did… weren’t whole.”
“And Jiselle?” I asked.
“She was brought in differently,” said the tall man even Kael didn’t pretend to understand. That’s
“For what?”
The woman hesitated.
To become something he couldn’t.”
Reverence. The flame in her was something
Successfully unlocked! e way he trained us. He started preparing her.”
My hands clenched.
The hooded man stepped forward, reaching into his coat. Bastain stiffened, blade now gripped tight, but the man didn’t flinch. He drew something wrapped in velvet, carefully untied the cloth, and revealed a blade no longer than a forearm- curved slightly, etched with runes I’d never seen before.
“This,” he said, “was made by one of the Council’s secret forgers. Before the collapse. It’s called the Mirror Fang.”
The blade shimmered strangely, catching not moonlight but something beneath it. Its edge was silver, but the core glowed faintly red. Old magic. Bound and buried.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“It severs bonds. Not just magical ones. Soul-ties. Mates. Power leashes. Even gifts, in rare cases.”
Bastain stepped forward. “That shouldn’t exist.”
The woman looked at me. “It does.”
. “And you’re just giving it to us?”
“No,” the tall man said. “We’re giving you a choice.”
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?