Ghoul (Royal Bastards MC: Cleveland Ohio Chapter Book 2) Read online

  Ghoul

  Royal Bastards MC: Cleveland, Ohio Chapter Book 2

  Chelle C. Craze

  Eli Abbott

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Royal Bastards Mc Series Second Run

  Royal Bastards Code

  A Note from The Authors

  1. Hazel

  2. Hazel

  3. Ghoul

  4. Hazel

  5. Ghoul

  6. Hazel

  7. Ghoul

  8. Hazel

  9. Ghoul

  10. Ghoul

  11. Ghoul

  12. Ghoul

  13. Hazel

  14. Ghoul

  15. Hazel

  16. Ghoul

  17. Hazel

  18. Ghoul

  19. Hazel

  20. Ghoul

  21. Hazel

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Royal Bastards Mc Series Second Run

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Chelle C. Craze & Eli Abbott

  Ghoul © 2020 Chelle C. Craze & Eli Abbott

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ghoul is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/ use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owner.

  Otherwise, hold on and enjoy the ride, you crazed lunatics!

  Editing & Proofreading by: Maria Vickers

  Cover by: Simply Defined Art

  Formatting by: Chelle C. Craze of Crazy Bird Imaginations

  Created with Vellum

  Sometimes you have to pay attention to the actions of a person and not the words to leave their mouth. For it is when we sit back and observe in silence that we learn the truth, others try to hide from us. Don’t go through your whole life blinded by what people want you to see. Do not run from your fears, embrace them, and always look beneath the surface.

  Synopsis

  I never hesitated to take a life in the name of my club, the RBMC. If they were stupid enough to cross us, then they didn’t deserve to live anyway. Other people recoiled at the thought of torturing another human being, not me. When death crawled closer, and I began to smell all those lost souls surrounding me, I found myself the most alive. I was a flawed individual, there was absolutely no questioning that. My insides were made up of too many fragmented pieces that were damaged beyond mending to ever return to normalcy…not that I ever truly knew it anyway.

  All of this was as natural to me as breathing, so questioning motives and being an enforcer was never something I did. It was not difficult to accept a life of wickedness when it was all I’ve ever known.

  Insert the problem, the most gorgeous broken beauty I had ever met. Her mind was sinister, maybe even worse than my own. The dynamic between us became a messed-up game of sadism, lust, and animosity. We never knew from one second to the next if the other’s fantasies were ones driven by adoration or disgust.

  To love or hate someone was intimate and elegant. Each took careful consideration for a person to feel, but the lines were often blurred with us. It wasn’t clear if either of us would survive the other, but that didn’t stop us. She was my addiction, and I was her obsession. Both of us were dangerous and unpredictable apart, but when our lives were interlaced so tightly, the result could be lethal.

  Royal Bastards Mc Series Second Run

  E.C. Land: Cyclone of Chaos

  Chelle C. Craze & Eli Abbot: Ghoul

  Scarlett Black: Ice

  Elizabeth Knox: Rely On Me

  J.L. Leslie: Worth the Risk

  Deja Voss: Lean In

  Khloe Wren: Blaze of Honor

  Misty Walker: Birdie’s Biker

  J. Lynn Lombard: Capone’s Chaos

  Ker Dukey: Rage

  Crimson Syn: Scarred by Pain

  M. Merin: Declan

  Elle Boon: Royally F**ked

  Rae B. Lake: Death and Paradise

  K Webster: Copper

  Glenna Maynard: Tempting the Biker

  K.L. Ramsey: Whiskey Tango

  Kristine Allen: Angel

  Nikki Landis: Devil’s Ride

  KE Osborn: Luring Light

  CM Genovese: Pipe Dreams

  Nicole James: Club Princess

  Shannon Youngblood: Leather & Chrome

  Erin Trejo: Unbreak Me

  Winter Travers: Six Gun

  Izzy Sweet & Sean Moriarty: Broken Ties

  Jax Hart: Desert Rose

  Royal Bastards MC Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/royalbastardsmc/

  Links can be found in our Website: www.royalbastardsmc.com

  Royal Bastards Code

  PROTECT: The club and your brothers come before anything else, and must be protected at all costs. CLUB is FAMILY.

  RESPECT: Earn it & Give it. Respect club law. Respect the patch. Respect your brothers. Disrespect a member and there will be hell to pay.

  HONOR: Being patched in is an honor, not a right. Your colors are sacred, not to be left alone, and NEVER let them touch the ground.

  OL’ LADIES: Never disrespect a member’s or brother’s Ol’Lady. PERIOD.

  CHURCH is MANDATORY.

  LOYALTY: Takes precedence over all, including well-being.

  HONESTY: Never LIE, CHEAT, or STEAL from another member or the club.

  TERRITORY: You are to respect your brother’s property and follow their Chapter’s club rules.

  TRUST: Years to earn it...seconds to lose it.

  NEVER RIDE OFF: Brothers do not abandon their family.

  A Note from The Authors

  This book is intended to be a prequel to the first in the series, Bad Like Me. However, each book is written so it may be read as a standalone and in any order.

  Hazel

  Childhood Home, West Virginia

  Circa 1991

  Being young was not the same as being naïve. It was clear things were going to change when my parents’ divorce finalized, this I understood. My mind hadn’t painted an imaginary perfect future where Mom and Dad separated, and we were still together as a family. This wasn’t the 1940’s. People ending their marriage did not cause as much shock as it once had in history. I knew because I’d spent countless hours researching divorce when it was first mentioned by my dad. He tried to ease the topic into conversation over ice cream as if the amount of sugar we were pumping into our bodies would make the subject any less painful. It didn’t. Any way you went about it, divorce sucked.

  The ink had barely dried on my parents’ divorce papers when Dad completely uprooted our entire lives. My friends and most of our family lived back home in West Virginia. Grams was
the only relative of ours in this state that I knew of, so I guess that home was where you made it. We moved for him to be able to provide us with a better future. Allegedly, Cleveland, Ohio, was the exact location he needed to be in to climb the ladder at his so-called job. He had claimed to work as a police officer for years now, but I’d never witnessed anything that backed up his story. I was the type of person who needed to see things to believe them. Just because I’d never seen proof didn’t mean that he was lying necessarily, but it did not make me believe him either. I was more of a pessimist than an optimist. He was my father, so if I was going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, it should have been him, but I didn’t.

  Other parents who were in law enforcement, my friend Landen’s dad, for example, never made me think he didn’t work in the field they said. We saw him several times a week, driving past the school in his police car while we were outside playing. Dad, on the other hand, left so much to be questioned. I never so much saw a badge sitting carelessly on his nightstand after he returned from being gone all day, much less a uniform or car. The only thing he’d driven with four wheels in a very long time had been the box truck that brought us here. Usually, he was on his motorcycle, and I was behind him. It never made sense, but I never bothered to question it until I overheard Mom and him fighting the night before we left West Virginia.

  “You’re not taking my kid into that Hell! It was your choice to hide the fact that you’re a cop and put yourself into danger. Not hers,” Mom frantically screamed, and something crashed against the shared wall between my bedroom and theirs. There was something different about her voice, it was desperate this time and lacking the fight and strength that was usually there. It was as if she had already lost the battle before a word left either of their mouths. I instantly got out of bed and hid beside their cracked bedroom door, listening to them argue with each other down the hall. Eavesdropping wasn’t enough; I had to see what was going on for myself. It wasn’t a new development for them to yell at each other, it had been happening for months, but the air in the house was stagnant. It was as if having the knowledge we were leaving tomorrow was making it harder for all of us to inhale oxygen into our bodies.

  “She is our child,” Dad stressed, throwing the fact I didn’t only belong to her into her face, as he had done multiple times recently. Even though their marriage had been falling apart for some time now, neither of them would move out of the house. Dad said it was pointless for him to find somewhere else to live in West Virginia since he was moving us to Ohio. The judge granted custody to him, but he had tried to keep us together as a family for months now. It was Mom who wanted him gone, and she had to understand that by forcing him to leave, she was doing the same to me. The thing was, she didn’t seem to have a problem with that fact until tonight.

  “It might not be ideal where I’m taking her, Karen, but she can’t stay here either. You’ve made that abundantly clear. Do you think I want to leave you here to let the drugs kill you? Because I don’t. I would die right beside you, but I have to protect our daughter. Even if it is from her own mother,” he admitted in a small defeated voice.

  “I know,” she confessed in between sobs. It wasn’t long before I joined her in heartbreak. Tears burned my eyes and slid down my cheeks in silence. I inched closer to them to beg dad to stay. I didn’t want any of this, it was the two of them who had the problem. Not me. Why couldn’t they find a solution to this that didn’t involve moving eight hours away from the place I called home? I wanted to let my thoughts fly out of my mouth and into the air with volume, but I didn’t. I couldn’t make this about me. It seemed like I stood at the edge of their room unnoticed long enough to have aged at least five years, but it was less than a minute. Time passed differently in life-altering instances. Quietly, I crept backward from where I stood to let them have this moment. Even if I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and wake tomorrow, realizing this had all been a dream, I had to accept this harsh reality and not interrupt it.

  I couldn’t change any of it. No matter how bad my insides hurt, I knew the pain Dad felt was worse. He meant what he’d said, if it wasn’t for me, he would die with Mom. She’d chosen her path, and she was always his until they had me. He was my protector up to this point, but something told me his armor wouldn’t be as shiny from this point on. Maybe it’d always taken both Mom and me to make perfection in his imperfect world. I would probably never know.

  Hazel

  Grams’ House

  Cleveland, Ohio

  “Shake a leg, Hazel Jane, cause if your ass isn’t down here in the next five minutes, your breakfast is going in the trash.” Grams’ voice carried up the stairs and into the bathroom. We’d been here for a little over two months and were settling into some semblance of a routine. Grams’ routine. The woman was a firm believer in eating at least three times a day, and she made sure Dad and I did, too.

  “I’ll be right down, Grams,” I answered her after popping the toothbrush out of my mouth and spitting toothpaste into the sink. That was another thing, she wasn’t a fan of repeating herself. It only took about two times of her having to remind me before I realized one very obvious thing about my grandmother, she was intense. I may have been too young to really pay attention to that until now, since I had only seen her for a handful of holidays until we moved in with her. She was stern, but one of the most caring people I had ever met, expecting a lot from the people around her, but it was never more than she would do herself. She was fair like that.

  “After you eat—”

  “I know, feed Charlie,” I interrupted her, plopping down at the table and scooping a forkful of eggs into my mouth. She turned ever so slightly away from the sink where she was washing dishes and raised her eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” I apologized for not letting her finish her sentence and intentionally dropped a bite of food on the floor for her German Shephard, Charlie. As soon as the food hit the floor, her ears perked up, and she was quick to snatch it up with her tongue. Her long tail wagged, but she didn’t bother to stand. She stretched her legs and repositioned herself, closing her eyes. Neither Charlie nor I wanted to be awake this early, but we both did what Grams said; therefore, we were.

  “I swear, I don’t know what kind of manners Karen and that son of mine taught you in West Virginia,” she said in a light tone, both of us knowing she meant each word that she spoke. I wanted to dislike her for all of her rules and chores, but oddly enough, it made me respect her. Before her, I was used to the way Mom did things. It wasn’t that Mom was a bad person, I never questioned if she loved me or anything like that, but she wasn’t consistent either. Some days, Mom made food and got out of bed, others, she stayed in bed, and I ate cereal and sandwiches. Grams could never replace Mom’s position in my heart, but it was nice to not wonder if I would be fending for myself for the day or not until Dad came home.

  The first week we were here, Dad didn’t leave for work. However, after that, things changed. Now, he was usually gone before I got up, or left shortly after, and didn’t come home a lot of nights before I went to bed. I made sure to pay extra attention to details once we got here, determined to figure out if he was lying to me about his job. I deserved to know the truth, considering he uprooted us and left Mom behind. She was the one who made the choice for all of us, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t sour about the entire situation.

  The good thing about Dad and Grams was their dependability to always do things around the same time. Every Wednesday evening, like clockwork, Grams went to her friend’s house to play cards, and on Thursday afternoon, she did her grocery shopping. Getting her schedule down wasn’t hard; she rarely veered from doing the same things from week to week. It made it easier to find answers to my curiousness about Dad.

  On Wednesdays, I rode my bike a little further each time, looking for Dad’s Harley, always making sure to be back home by nine. Thursdays were the same, I was out searching for him, but returned earlier at six. It took the remainder of the mon
th to even come close to finding anything out.

  I checked the watch on my wrist, I still had an hour before I had to head home. It was plenty of time to go a bit further. A sleek black motorcycle parked outside a huge beige building flashed out of the corner of my eyes, and I slammed on my pedals. It was Dad’s. This was the first big break in my ongoing investigation of him since I started. Honestly, I was feeling like a bit of an idiot for continuing after the first few days of coming up empty-handed.

  This place wasn’t easy to find, but maybe that was why he was here. He didn’t want to be found. I smirked and hopped off my bike, walking beside it to a nearby bush, which was the perfect height to hide any evidence of me being here. Dad would absolutely lose his shit if he knew I’d stumbled upon him. My heartbeat pounded in my ear as I inched closer to the building where his Harley was parked. It was pure dumb luck that I found him. I thanked my lucky stars and prayed that this would finally lead to some answers. I had to be careful, though. If Dad caught me, I would be grounded for the rest of my life…if not by him, by Grams. I didn’t know what either of them would think a suiting punishment would be, but I didn’t plan to find out either.