Forced to be Theirs by the Quadruplet Brothers

The last day of summer was always the worst.

Aurora Vance stared at the half-packed suitcase lying open on her bed like a gaping wound. Each neatly folded, secondhand t-shirt and pair of faded jeans felt like a lead weight, another anchor chaining her to a fate she desperately wanted to escape. Outside her small window, the late August sun beat down on the pavement, radiating a suffocating heat that mirrored the anxiety tightening its fist around her chest.

Tomorrow, she would return to Stormfall Academy.

A bitter laugh escaped her lips, sounding harsh in the quiet of her cramped room. For most, returning to the prestigious academy was a cause for celebration. It meant reuniting with friends, bragging about lavish European vacations, and showing off new designer clothes. For them, it was a homecoming. For Aurora, a scholarship student, it was a return to the front lines.

She ran a hand through her long, honey-blonde hair, the gesture weary. She remembered last year with a clarity that still made her stomach clench: the whispers that followed her down the hallowed halls, the sneers from girls whose monthly allowance could have paid her rent for a year. The "socialist princesses," she called them in the privacy of her own head, girls who talked about equality and justice while turning up their noses at her non-designer shoes. She was an anomaly, a charity case, an outsider who had clawed her way in through academic merit alone. And they never let her forget it.

The isolation was a physical ache, a constant, low-grade pain. She learned to make herself small, to drift through the crowds unnoticed, to eat her lunch quickly in a forgotten corner of the library. She learned to live with the fear—the fear of being called out, of being humiliated, of having her one meager set of nice clothes "accidentally" ruined by a spilled latte.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, jolting her from her reverie. The screen lit up with a name that was both a comfort and a painful reminder of the world she didn't belong to: Chloe Sterling.

Sliding her finger across the screen, she put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Chlo.”

“Rory! Oh my gods, you will not believe it!” Chloe’s voice was a supernova of pure, unadulterated joy, so bright it almost hurt to listen to. Chloe was the daughter of the reigning Alpha of the Nightstorm pack, a girl born into so much power and privilege it was practically a second skin. Yet, somehow, she had chosen Aurora, the packless nobody, as her best friend. She was the one ray of light in Aurora’s otherwise gray existence at the academy.

“What is it?” Aurora asked, a genuine smile touching her lips for the first time all day.

“I found him, Rory! I found my mate!”

The words hit Aurora like a physical blow, knocking the air from her lungs. A mate. The one person designated by the Moon Goddess herself, a perfect soul-deep connection that every werewolf dreamed of. For a moment, envy, sharp and ugly, coiled in her gut. It was immediately followed by a wave of guilt. How could she be envious of Chloe’s happiness?

“Oh, Chloe, that’s… that’s amazing,” she managed, forcing the words past the lump in her throat. “Who is it?”

“It’s Leo Vance! The future Beta!” Chloe was practically singing. “We met at a council meeting last week and it was… instant. You know? My wolf, she just went crazy. We're having a celebratory dinner at the main pack house tonight, and you have to come! It won't be the same without you.”

The main pack house. The Sterling family manor. A place so far removed from Aurora's life it might as well have been on another planet. It was the heart of the Nightstorm pack, ruled by Alpha Marcus Sterling and his four notorious sons—the quadruplet Alphas. Damian, Julian, Ronan, and Silas. Four men who were spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, beings of mythic power and terrifying charisma who would one day inherit the pack. She had never seen them, but their reputation preceded them. Chloe was their sister, a princess in their kingdom.

And now Chloe had her mate, her future secured. She would be the Beta Female, forever loved, forever protected. It was everything Aurora secretly craved.

“I… I don’t know, Chlo,” Aurora stammered, her eyes falling back to her shabby suitcase. “I have to finish packing, and I don't really have anything to wear to an Alpha's dinner party.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can borrow something of mine. Please, Rory? For me?”

The plea in her friend’s voice was impossible to resist. “Okay,” Aurora sighed, surrendering. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

After ending the call, Aurora sank onto the edge of her bed, the earlier anxiety now twisted into a knot of profound self-pity and longing. She pressed her palms against her eyes. Her own history was a blank page. Her adoptive parents, kind but simple humans, had found her as an infant, abandoned at the edge of the woods that bordered the pack lands. She was a foundling, with no knowledge of her birth parents, her bloodline, or her pack. She was nothing.

Who would ever want a mate with no name, no history, no status? Who would look past her poverty and her unknown, likely shameful, origins to see her?

As the afternoon light began to fade, casting long shadows across her room, Aurora closed her eyes and offered a silent, desperate prayer to the deity she wasn't sure even listened.

Moon Goddess, she pleaded, her heart aching with a familiar, hopeless desire. Please. Someday, let there be someone for me, too.