Page 20 of Brutal Alpha's Forced Mate

“They’re linked now,” she explains, brushing a stray strand of reddish-brown hair out of her face. “If one gets triggered, the others will amplify the signal and carry it back to the main ward line. You’ll get a warning faster, and it’ll be harder for anything to slip past unnoticed.”

I let out a low whistle, impressed despite myself. “Not bad.”

She arches a brow. “Not bad? You do realize I just saved your pack from another potential ambush, right?”

“Don’t let it go to your head, Kismet.”

Her lips twitch like she’s trying not to smile, and she turns away before I can catch her expression. “Come on,” she says. “We’ve got more ground to cover.”

Before she gets too far, I step up beside her, and my curiosity gets the better of me. “How’d you learn to do all this, anyway? Last time I saw you, you were struggling just to control a spark.”

Her expression tightens for a fraction of a second, so quick I might’ve missed it if I hadn’t been watching her so closely. “I didn’t have much of a choice.”

I wait, sensing there’s more. When she glances at me and sees I’m not letting it drop, she sighs. “Malcolm. He had me working in a… well, let’s just call it what it was: a sweatshop for witches. He used witches to mass-produce charms, potions, trinkets. Whatever he could sell. Most of the witches he brought in were experienced, people who’d been at this their whole lives.I was… not.” She hesitates, brushing her hands off on her jeans before continuing. “I had to pick things up fast if I wanted to keep up.”

“And if you didn’t?”

She shrugs, but the motion is too casual, too forced. “Then he made sure I regretted it.”

My hands curl into fists at my sides, the image of her—barely more than a kid, forced into that hellhole—rattling around in my mind. “I didn’t know,” I say quietly, though the words feel hollow even to me.

“Of course you didn’t.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, not cruel, but it still stings. “Anyway, the witches there didn’t have much choice but to teach me. If one of us failed, we all paid for it. I learned by watching them, by practicing when no one was looking. After a while… it just clicked.”

She doesn’t look at me as she speaks, but I can hear the undercurrent of pride in her voice. Yet, it’s buried under something heavier—bitterness, maybe. Regret.

“You shouldn’t have had to go through that,” I say, and the words are low, almost guttural. “None of it.”

Her gaze snaps to mine, and for a moment, there’s something raw and unguarded in her eyes. But then she laughs, a sharp, humorless sound. “That’s the thing about survival, Gray. It doesn’t care about should or shouldn’t. It just is.”

She turns away again, starting toward the next marker without waiting for me to follow. I trail after her, and my thoughts are a storm of guilt and anger. Whatever I expected her answer to be, it wasn’t that.

But one thing’s clear: Jaslyn Kismet is stronger than I ever gave her credit for. And she learned that strength the hard way.

We move through the forest, falling into a rhythm that’s surprisingly natural. Jaslyn leads the way, her magic flowing around her like a second skin. Every now and then, I catch her glancing at the trees, her green eyes narrowing as if she’s sensing something just out of reach.

She stops suddenly, holding up a hand. “Here. This spot’s weak.”

I look around, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. “How can you tell?”

“It feels… thin,” she explains, frowning. “Like the boundary here is stretched too far. If anything’s going to break through, this is where it’ll happen.”

I trust her judgment, even if I can’t feel what she does. Jaslyn steps forward, kneeling once again to draw a circle in the dirt. Her movements are quick and precise as her fingers trace symbols that glow faintly as she works.

“What’s that?” I ask, crouching beside her.

“A reinforcing sigil,” she replies without looking up. “It’ll bolster the ward line and keep it from collapsing under pressure.”

“Pressure like… a demon?”

“Exactly.”

She finishes the sigil and places a small charm at its center, an iron medallion etched with runes. Her magic flares again, bright and sharp, and the sigil pulses before fading into the ground.

“There,” she says. “That should hold.”

I glance at the spot, still unable to see or feel anything different. “How long will it last?”

“A few weeks, maybe longer if the energy doesn’t get disturbed. I told you I know what I’m doing.”

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