Is 'Trickery' Based On A True Story?

Community Service. Two words I should be thankful for, but I’m not. I resent the hours it’s away from building my business. When they push the little girl into the room, her crazy curls barely held back by the barrette in her hair, and studious glasses on her face, I can tell she’s scared. Something inside of me breaks, and I want this girl to feel wanted again. What I’m unprepared for is meeting her mom. The second our hands touch, there are fireworks, bright lights, and a picture of the future I could one day have. The future I’ve never allowed myself to wish for. Community service becomes more than a chore. In the months that follow, I realize they’re just like me: they’ve been abandoned, left behind by the world, forgotten by those who should love them. Thanks to the one last hope in both our lives - we found the light in the darkness we’d been searching for.Trick is created by Laramie Briscoe, an eGlobal Creative Publishing author.

Parting had never been so painful for lovers whose connections was so strong and whose bond was simply unbreakable. When Tristan, a simple man whose life was filled with plans and steady waves that never shook him had to leave his beloved Danica when a mighty wave had taken him off balance and pushed him into being a coward, he thought it was going to simply be as simple as it had always been. Danica would remain in the dark and wouldn’t hate him and he would never return to his dark life. It was a simple plan, he would leave, get settled and bring his beloved Danica with him where he would not be found by the beast of a man who was targeting to take his blood, his peace and his life along side. The universe had a different plan when running away simply was not enough and his beloved Danica got tangled up with the mafia boss of San Diego, his younger brother. And it was no longer as easy as he wanted. Not just because he was so far away, or because Danica was tangled with his brother, it became difficult when Danica’s revenge scheme instantly took hold of her heart and pushed her into doing the very thing that would tear them apart. “Its simply a part of the plan,” she had said when he had confronted her about the relationship she had with his brother. But it was more, it was more because love, blood and revenge tangled them together. Where Danica had to either choose to take revenge for her father’s death and harm the men she loved the most or simply forget, pick one of the brothers and love him while her father’s murderer move around freely?

To Lara, love meant spending forty years with your partner, wading through a mountain of problems and coming out of it unscathed, together. To Tristan, love was weakness, a mere tool to exploit one's vulnerability. When Lara formed an unlikely alliance with Tristan, she could never imagine the possibilty of loving somebody like Tristan; a grumpy, arrogant jerk. But somewhere down the road, she found herself falling for a man whom she knew could never love her back.

To save my mother who's been bitten by a zombie, I exchange my own kidney for the only vial of serum that's available. I'm not given any anesthetic during the surgery. I bite down on a wooden rod until it snaps, but I still don't make a single sound. But when I rush back to the shelter to look for Mom, I catch her talking to someone on the phone. "You should drop the act soon, Mrs. Sawyer. Mr. Sawyer is going to collapse if this continues!" I recognize the voice. It belongs to Mom's assistant, Richard Peterson. "What's the rush?" Mom replies flippantly. "Although Terence is my son, he's never faced any hardship since he was a child. He doesn't know how hard it is to earn money. "I had to overcome many challenges before I became the richest person in the city. What if Terence is only treating me well for my money? He must pass this test to prove that his love for me is genuine." I clench my fists. The life-saving serum drops to the floor. It turns out that the apocalypse and the man-eating zombies aren't real. I have carried Mom on my back while darting through ruins for the last month. I eat rotten meat and even sacrifice my kidney without any hesitation for her, but everything is just part of a test that she designed. I look down at the bloody hole that wasn't stitched up properly on the side of my waist. Mom thinks that everything is just part of an act, but she has no idea that the doctor who wandered onto the set and performed the surgery on me is real.

Mercy was all I asked for but I guess I didn't deserve it. Dragged by her long nappy hair, like a heavy bag carried by a weak person through the mud and sand. Her screams and begging fell of deaf ears, not even her father batted an eye. Torture seemed to find her everywhere, even now, as everyone applauded with smiles, wishing the newly wedded couple, a beautiful life ahead. A marriage that marked the beginning of endless an and undisturbed torture.

I was an extremely selfish person. I drained my parents’ life savings, abused my young nephew, and extorted my husband’s premarital assets. My family could no longer endure it and took me to court. If the charges were proven, I would be flayed alive, my tendons torn out, tortured until death.