Title: Shift (Disciples' Daughters #2)
Author: Drew Elyse
Genre: Contemporary/MC Romance
Release Date: April 19, 2016
Synopsis
Once a Disciple, forever a Disciple.
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Prologue
Gabe
5 Years Ago
“You can’t be serious.”
I said the words, but looking at the girl in front of me, I could tell she was. My Ash was reserved. Her emotions were always hiding beneath the surface. They broke through only sometimes.
In that moment, her desperation wasn’t hidden at all.
“It’s dangerous,” she insisted.
I tried to stay calm, to reason with her. “Ash, babe, just last week you were as excited as I was about me getting a prospect patch. I’ve always wanted to be a Disciple, and it was what you wanted, too.”
“That was before they killed my dad!”
Fuck.
Her head was totally fucked over this.
“You know they didn’t. They’re mourning Indian as much as I am, as much as you are. He died, and it’s fucking terrible, but you know any of those men would give their own life to bring him back to you. If you just calm down, you know it’s true.”
Tears fell from her blue eyes—eyes that had been stained red for over a week. Nothing made a man feel more fucking impotent than watching his woman cry constantly and not being able to do a damn thing about it. I hadn’t lied; any of the Savage Disciples MC men would give up their lives in an instant to bring their fallen brother back, to give Ash back her dad. I would take a bullet right then and there just to make her stop hurting.
“They might not have meant for him to die, but it’s their fault. The fucking club is the reason he’s gone!” She went right on working herself up.
In that moment, I wanted to be able to rewind more than I could put in to words. Just over a week before, we were happy. Everything was good. Fuck, everything was going exactly as it should.
I’d been made a prospect for the club, the first step to my fucking life-long dream of being a member. My uncle, Gunner, put the cut on me himself. It was everything I’d wanted since I could remember, since the first time Gunner brought me around the club as a kid.
The first thing I did? I went to Ash.
My girl, the daughter of a Disciple, grew up with the club. The brothers were her family, just like they were mine. Since I was six years old and I first met her, she’d known having that patch was all I wanted. Fourteen years later, it was real.
Ash was fucking thrilled. My firefly beamed as bright as I’d ever seen her. She’d thrown herself into my arms. She couldn’t stop looking at the cut on my shoulders, the visual proof it was really happening. At least, she couldn’t stop looking until I got her to take it off me so we could really get to celebrating.
But that night, with Ash curled up next to me in my bed, my cell rang. The first bad sign was the three a.m. call. The second was the way Gunner greeted me.
“Is Ash with you?”
I didn’t know why he would need to ask that. Ash was nearly always with me. Indian might not have liked it, but his daughter was eighteen. And anyway, she’d been staying the night with me on occasion even before that. So yeah, if she weren’t at home with Indian, she was in my bed.
I hadn’t expected him to be asking because there was no way for Indian to tell them she wasn’t home.
I hadn’t expected that I would need to wake my girl in the middle of the night.
I hadn’t expected that it would fall on me to tell her her only family member was gone.
I did, however, expect the way Ash had fallen apart at the news. I was even prepared for the fact that she wouldn’t bounce back from it right away. Moving forward was going to be a long road for her, I knew that.
Still, I never could have guessed she’d even think the things she was saying to me.
“So what, Ash? You want me to leave the club? Give up being a prospect and just take off?” She couldn’t mean that.
“Yes.” Not even a moment’s hesitation.
“The club is family.”
“I know your uncle is—”
“No. Ash, the club is family. All of them, not just my uncle. The brothers are our family.”
She looked at me and something about her eyes scared the shit out of me. “No. I don’t have a family anymore.”
Fuck. It was so much worse than I thought.
“Baby, the brothers are still your family. They helped raise you. Can you honestly say Roadrunner, Tank, Gunner, Stone—none of those men are your family? They love you.”
Her tears came harder, but there was no surrender in her. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t stay here and wait for the club to take anyone else from me.” A sob rocked her before she could say, “I can’t stay here and wait until it takes you.”
I tried to give her distance. I tried to stand across the room from her like she’d asked so she could talk, but I wasn’t doing that shit anymore. The second I had my arms around her, her face burrowed into my chest and she sobbed. It was a position we’d become all too familiar with.
“Firefly, listen to me,” I said into her hair, “I know you’re hurting, but this isn’t right. I can’t leave the club. I won’t. Once this pain isn’t so fresh, you won’t want to either. We’ll get through this, babe. Just hold onto me.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t argue any more. I got her into bed thinking I talked her off the ledge. She was staying. We were staying right where we were supposed to be.
I woke in the morning to find out I was very, very wrong.
About The Author
Drew Elyse spends her days trying to convince the world that she is, in fact, a Disney Princess, and her nights writing tear-jerking and smutty romance novels.
When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found over-analyzing every line of a book, binge watching a series on Netflix, doing strange vocal warm ups before singing a variety of music styles, or screaming at the TV during a Chicago Blackhawks game.
A graduate of Loyola University Chicago with a BA in English, she still lives in Chicago, IL where she was born and raised with her boyfriend and her fur babies Lola and Duncan.
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