text: Dedicated to and based on a concept by Danschneider Arroyo, for every scammed author and lover everywhere... Chapter 54 East Vrmlmelmnsk, Syburslovenia At last, Alexis’ heart’s desire was within one GPS turn of fulfillment, and her desirous heart thumped rapidly as she crossed the landfill beyond the village bazaar. The trans-Atlantic journey, the loss of her luggage at the charmingly quaint bicycle-powered Aeropotschk carousel, the succession of taxis and taxi robberies, the bribes to countless provincial cops, the chicken she was coerced to buy at the market, the foreigny threats that bombarded her as she roamed the cobbled streets in search of 12 Zjrchskmsk Avenue, rooster wrestling under her arm -- it would all be worth it when she could look her pfisher soulmate in his unpatched eye. “Your destination is in 300 feet, on your left,” Siri cooed. “Please be aware of organ harvesting activity ahead; I can devise an alternative route back to the Aeropotschk...” But Alexis now was guided by her appetites rather than her apps, and she pressed ahead, gently driving away one of the local street weasels that might have been the twin of the creature she’d nibbled at a charmingly retro crate in the marketplace, after her desire-filled gut had throbbed with non-cardiac desire for something beyond the boiled airline chickpeas. Her heart swelled with swollen feelings as she reached the last hovel at the end of the block before the rustic old cell phone/nuclear waste dump. Her delicate, alabaster fist-blossom froze before the warped plank that served as the door. This was crazy - when the private eye her BFFs at the cat café/cupcake emporium had hired for her traced the pfisher’s IP address to this tiny hamlet in a pastorally bombed-out former Soviet republic, she’d poured out her pain and fury at this Facebook scammer before understanding that rage is but the other side of that coin we call love. Between the lines of the badly constructed, clumsy warning that her system had been compromised and the ransomware demand, Alexis could sense the heart of a wounded outlaw soul. Like Beauty and her Beast, Bullock and her Jesse James... Steeling her desire-saturated heart, the baker/quilter-turned-author rapped on the splintered wood like a desirous heart beating out a rhythm of love. “Come. To. Me; Come. To. Me.” The love-plank finally shifted, and a glacially blue eye peered from the shadows, like the piercing light of Cupid’s lighthouse beacon across the dark and ripply waters of doubt and pain. Alexis now knew her story wasn’t the website romance that “Lance Boyles” had pirated into an internationally acclaimed erotic vampire suspense thriller. Her story began with this rogue who indeed had stolen her desire-riddled heart. “Lance” grunted a series of long words neither Alexis nor most of her readers would have understood even had they been in English rather than some rural Slovenian language. Only her fondant sous-chef Russian Mikhail back home was poly-Slavic, but while he had insisted on accompanying her on her journey, Mikhail himself had found bliss with the lady day-trader from the city who’d finally taken her face out of her laptop long enough to discover the true meaning of rapture and pre-molded frosting at the town bake-off and comforter fair. The ceremony was next week at the old fiction mill by the river, the Reverend Dodge officiating. Alexis thus implored Lance to repeat his declaration into her cellphone. Her Cunning Linguist app translated. “It is you, my Alexis, at last. You have made the future of my destiny a reality!” He shoved the plank aside and emerged. Aside from the gnarled and possibly infected face-navel that had once served as his left eye, Lance was perfect. Hours of hacking and scamming in his dark garret had chiseled his upper arms into Greek statue kind of arms, and his jogging suit-draped legs had been shaped by constant escape from global law enforcement and Bulgarian mobsters. Lance’s was a life lived large, and Alexis felt a stirring in her loins wholly different than her reaction to the boiled garbanzos. Alexis fell into Lance’s arms, and his eye leaked dewy tears of love moisture. Lance grunted again, his Tokarev gun dipping sensually below his pelvis. “Can you forgive me?” Cunning Linguist recited. “Forgive you???” Alexis gasped, catching a lungful of waste dump sulfur. “You silly, beautiful Cyclops! You have made my humble paranormal suspense novella a classic in five Eurasian markets, and Kindled the long-extinguished embers of desire in my heart furnace. And besides...” She displayed the locket she had blinded a cabbie/former surgeon to protect. The woman had gone down hard and valiantly, and Alexis vowed to name a werewraith in her next novel after the driver, adding a few vowels for reader ease, of course. The filigreed gold clamshell was inscribed with her non-nom de plume fake writer name. Lance squinted at the florid mall engraving, then switched to his good eye. A.I. Chatt . Alexis’ digitalized heart swelled with love blood as the thief of that previously mentioned heart realized there was nothing for his future life mate to forgive. No more torture or remorse or fear of mercenary revenge squad retaliation. Lance’s life of underground plagiarism had nearly ended in violence numerous times - the Kindle Unlimited attack on his favorite wifi coffee shop/arms dealer; Nora Roberts’ Mossad-trained hit squad coming after his mother as she prepared his beloved borscht and cloned stolen Discover cards. The grainy photos of the meeting between a coldly vengeful and immaculately put-together Danielle Steele and Ivan the Badger in a Budapest Chik-Fil-A his bro Sergei the trafficker had Messenger’d him. As colleague after colleague had been “Kristin Hannah’ed,” as those in the trade called it, Lance had stayed one step ahead. Now, he had been apprehended by this spunky paperback word-poet, his heart clamped in the titanium grip of Alexis’ love-cuffs. His sentence? Life, in a maximum security prison with Alexis as his love-jailer. Lance grunted. Cunning Linguist processed Alexis’ newfound language of love. “So. You want to see the place?” “Oh, yes, YES! On the soul of Stephenie Meyer, a million times YES!” Alexis exclaimed, flattening a feral cat as she hurled the plank aside. She felt like a bad Eastern European knockoff of Pinocchio (one of Lance’s top-selling works in the Russian children’s market and unedited, on the YA list). Alexis’ Intel chip glowed warm within her OEM bosom. Tonight, she would become a real woman, if they could figure out a workable interface...