WARNING: This book was not written for you.
It was written for a judge. A specific one. Local. Sitting on the bench with jurisdiction over what you're about to read.
You just picked it up first.
If you're an attorney or a psychologist, buckle up. When you're done, pass it up the chain to a judge. It was designed as a last-ditch effort to land hard in the right hands. When it does, it's gonna land hard.
That's what the truth does.
This is not an act. This is how I think. This is who I am.
If you consider yourself a human being who chooses the moral high ground of "victim" over facing liars and thieves in public, put the book down. It's not for you.
Now that we've eliminated the truest liars and the real fakes from the jury pool, the rest of you qualify as real people and are hereby summoned.
All colors, shapes, sizes, faiths, alignments, groups, adults: welcome to sit in this very special and rare jury box. Special because this court has issued a new mandate, expanding its capacity to seat an unlimited panel. Overruling standard operating procedure, all prior disqualifications are hereby stayed. Even convicted criminals are being called to sit on this jury.
And that's just the first adjustment.
The total inversion of courtroom authority is something else entirely.
This judge has granted each juror a power never seen in any courtroom before today. The power to pause proceedings, rewind, and replay live testimony. To call a recess at leisure. Even to discuss the proceedings freely outside this courtroom and nominate additional jurors to the panel.
The judge in this case is so wise, he has also granted you the power to excuse yourself entirely, on account of the intensely graphic scenes and the high potential for offending sensitive groups who process reality through sugar-coated lullabies, who need their wives to lay out their clothes and pick their breakfast cereal.
You were warned above. If you failed to self-disqualify then, the exit is still open.
Take it.
The only disqualifier not listed above is the child molester. This court revokes your civil rights permanently and rules you shouldn't be reading anything, anywhere. This court hereby compels you to honor yourself and dispatch your transport to the Judge with discretionary jurisdiction. The Judge with the power to remove certain receptor thresholds known to trigger ceiling events in the biological hardware, causing protective shutdowns commonly known as fainting or shock.
The only Judge a pathogen could petition to have its sentence commuted to de-creation.
Notice: I don't follow the rules. The rest of the back cover is inside…
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THE TAKEOVER ARTIST · MIKE NELSON
THE TAKEOVER ARTIST
PREFACE
my books entered the room. The conversation about my books was the only opening she needed. She used it as a professional pretext to shift the focus to her own operation, bringing up her cousin, Sarah, who handled her bookkeeping department. "You know, Sarah's single," she'd said out of nowhere, her voice laced with an awkward matchmaking enthusiasm that caught me completely off guard. "She's not really dating right now... she's a little self-conscious about her figure." Looking back, that detail was the hook, baited and dropped right in front of me. It naturally made me curious about who this Sarah was, what she looked like, whether the self-consciousness was warranted. It was a deliberate seed planted in Bianca's weird world of sexual agendas. The bit about the figure was probably her own insecurity talking, dressed up in her cousin's name. I realize now she was testing, seeking information, trying to find the line. Feeling out whether I was a piece of shit willing to play on the side. The whole exchange was bizarre. It turned from a professional call into feeling like she was running a dating service from her accounting office, completely deaf to the fact I had already told her, multiple times, that I was in a committed relationship. She had a talent for opening doors no one knocked on, for dragging inappropriate topics into the room and treating them as casually as comments on the weather. It was a shameless maneuver, off base against every professional conversation we'd ever had. It was the first clear sign that the standard rules of engagement didn't apply to her; she was operating from a different playbook entirely. I should have recognized it for what it was: reconnaissance. She was testing my boundaries, gauging my responses, probing angles, mapping the terrain before the real campaign began. Once we were on-site, the probing became more direct, more aggressive, but never so direct that it was beyond the point of plausible deniability. She was sixteen years older, so she had that angle too, the one she could fall back on easily and pretend she didn't have a soaking wet hole she was trying to stuff. She was an artist when it came to teetering on the line of inappropriateness, while keeping her innuendos within a professional context so that she could always fall back on the facade of innocence. She was a master at setting up opportunities to open forbidden doors. So I deployed the armor. Full force. Over and over. Shari, my angel. My girl. What Shari and I had planned that weekend. How long we'd been together. I worked her name into every opening
19ve, but never so direct that it was beyond the point of plausible deniability. She was sixteen years older, so she had that angle too, the one she could fall back on easily and pretend she didn't have a soaking wet hole she was trying to stuff. She was an artist when it came to teetering on the line of inappropriateness, while keeping her innuendos within a professional context so that she could always fall back on the facade of innocence. She was a master at setting up opportunities to open forbidden doors. So I deployed the armor. Full force. Over and over. Shari, my angel. My girl. What Shari and I had planned that weekend. How long we'd been together. I worked her name into every opening she left me, and when she didn't leave one, I made one. With any other woman, that was the end of it. The conversation would pivot back to concrete, to project specifications, to business. The flirtation would deflate like a punctured tire, and we'd move on. But with Bianca, it was like firing a blank into the void. The words left my mouth, traveled the distance between us, and simply... evaporated. They had no impact whatsoever. She just kept coming. She ignored the boundary entirely, bulldozing the conversation into whatever territory she desired, as if my relationship was nothing more than a minor inconvenience to be worked around. "That's sweet," she'd say, her smile never wavering. "Shari's a lucky girl." And then she'd continue whatever line of conversation she'd been pursuing, as if I hadn't spoken at all. I didn't know how to respond to that. This was uncharted ground. In my years running a business, dealing with clients, I'd never encountered someone who so blatantly refused to acknowledge clearly stated boundaries. You have to understand my personality here. I was cocky, genuinely bragging, and for some reason she took it as a challenge, like we were in a pissing contest. Then she'd just dissociate from the whole conversation. I was on her turf, playing a high-stakes game where she held the only card that mattered: my taxes. I had everything riding on this job. I was under the biggest guillotine blade yet, and she was the only thing keeping my neck out from under it. I was there for one thing: to get my finances in order and to deliver a product beyond her expectations so my side of the barter would be beyond question. Then came the move that shifted the entire game from probing to a full-on campaign, the moment when subtlety gave way to strategy. She came out to the site one afternoon, her tablet in hand, her expression serious and professional. She looked
20d come running to me focused on the problem instead of the solution, what caused it, whose fault it was, why it had them stuck, reporting it like it deserved attention instead of resolution. Here's the part that always got me: if I asked what they'd do if I wasn't there, the solution was the first thing out of their mouth. To me, that was the real problem. And I had a name for it. Defective mindset. Something I loathed so much it had zero chance of survival if it showed up anywhere on my radar. I was like a sniper waiting for the opportunity to deliver correction with brutal efficiency, enjoying the verbal kill shot whenever it presented itself. I saw it as infectious, dangerous for those with compromised mental immune systems. All it took was one idiot to cough that contagious shit into the air and they'd start dropping like flies. Next thing you know, instead of working, they're standing around trading opinions like sports anchors listing stats on a highlight reel, while the clock keeps running and nothing actually gets done. Something my wallet's never-satisfied appetite couldn't stomach and so out would come the rifle. I completely ditched the rifle on myself. Instead, I leaned into the defective mindset, hard, feeding it everything it wanted, daily, until it became something else entirely more dangerous. A memoir. Hypocrite? Sure, I'll own that one. It's called the sword of truth for a reason and mine happens to be razor sharp and double-edged. It cuts both ways indiscriminately with total recall until nobody's left standing, including me. The writing process served as an effective coping mechanism: a way to process what happened and even learn more about myself. An opportunity for growth through honest reflection at the end of the day. But before that can happen, the blood must be shed. With that said, demolition day has always been my favorite day on the job: I'm extraordinarily efficient at it, and unlike most honest work, it's always fun Be warned. I removed the governor, stripped the safety censors, and said my last prayers like a kamikaze nearing the moment of impact. That intensity is sustained throughout the book. There is nothing pretty ahead. Final warning.Shari was more than a trophy. More than a perfect fit. More than the one I bragged about nonstop to anyone in the room. She was my armor. In a world full of bored, wealthy housewives and their casual temptations, women who saw contractors as convenient diversions from their manicured monotony, her name was the shutdown command. Say it once and the conversation went back to concrete. A wa
17'm extraordinarily efficient at it, and unlike most honest work, it's always fun Be warned. I removed the governor, stripped the safety censors, and said my last prayers like a kamikaze nearing the moment of impact. That intensity is sustained throughout the book. There is nothing pretty ahead. Final warning.Shari was more than a trophy. More than a perfect fit. More than the one I bragged about nonstop to anyone in the room. She was my armor. In a world full of bored, wealthy housewives and their casual temptations, women who saw contractors as convenient diversions from their manicured monotony, her name was the shutdown command. Say it once and the conversation went back to concrete. A wall that had never been breached in all the years we'd been together. I was proud to be the guy who, unlike so many others in this industry, went home to the same woman every night. That mattered to me. It meant something. My company was like my only child, something I was willing to lay my life down for, something I'd poured every ounce of sweat and obsession into building. One of the side-effects of the assisted slow-roll of the summer was the isolation it created. I was fully consumed on jobsites, either undermanned or completely solo, stuck working late into the evenings while the summer sun stretched out its dying light. That relentless grind cheated us of our time together and left me exposed in ways I was about to realize too late. If I could go back in time, I would have traded it all for Shari. I never imagined a life without both. She didn't deserve what was about to happen. It started with quiet, probing attacks, so subtle at first I almost missed them entirely. I remember a phone call, weeks before her job started, when we were still in the planning phase. We were talking about logistics, suppliers, equipment access, the usual dance of coordinating a major project, then my books entered the room. The conversation about my books was the only opening she needed. She used it as a professional pretext to shift the focus to her own operation, bringing up her cousin, Sarah, who handled her bookkeeping department. "You know, Sarah's single," she'd said out of nowhere, her voice laced with an awkward matchmaking enthusiasm that caught me completely off guard. "She's not really dating right now... she's a little self-conscious about her figure." Looking back, that detail was the hook, baited and dropped right in front of me. It naturally made me curious about who this Sarah was, what she looked like, whether the self-consciousness was warranted. It was a deliberate
18 fluid motion, she turned slightly to the side with her backside aimed towards me. She reached back with one hand, grabbed the flesh of her own ass cheek through her skirt, lifted it provocatively, and let it drop with a soft jiggle and a giggle that sounded like a victory dance. My body reacted before my brain could catch up. A surge shot through me: adrenaline, testosterone, shock, arousal, all of it hitting simultaneously like a drug injected directly into my brainstem. An instant, rock-hard erection almost ripped through my Carhartts. And everyone was looking. Before I could process, before I could formulate a response or a retreat, she closed the distance. One step. Two steps. Three. And then she literally jumped on top of me. Her arms wrapped around my neck. Her legs circled my waist. Her body pressed against mine with undeniable intention. The scent of her perfume mixed with jobsite dust and sweat. Her breathing was against my ear. Right there in the open. Right in front of my crew, who stood frozen like they were watching a nature documentary, their eyes wide, watching in amazement. Right in front of the web of security cameras her husband had surrounding the property, their recording lights blinking in my peripheral vision. Right there, with him just inside the house, maybe ten yards away, separated by nothing but shingle siding and drywall. His ignorance questionable. It was insane. It was an ambush. It was checkmate. My mind exploded into alarm bells, each one ringing a different warning. *Fuck, this is in front of my guys. I can't back down now. I've been egging this shit on, talking the big talk, playing the game. If I push her off, I'm a pussy. If I don't, I'm betraying Shari. The cameras, fuck, the cameras are recording this. Her husband. The audit. My reputation. My relationship. Everything is on the line right now, in this moment...* Too late to turn back now. That was the problem. My hands hovered uselessly at my sides, caught between steadying her and pushing her away, doing neither. The bitch had me in a deadlock. The social pressure, the performance, the need to maintain the facade I'd built over the last few days of jokes and innuendo, I was pinned against an invisible wall with her whole body wrapped around me. Frozen in an alternate universe, literally stuck there, paralyzed with a boner I couldn't hide. The playful teasing had become a high-stakes reality. My shield was dropped when I sent the text message, and her response left no recovery option at the speed she operated. I was completely, totally, fucked. This didn’t start out
15back now. That was the problem. My hands hovered uselessly at my sides, caught between steadying her and pushing her away, doing neither. The bitch had me in a deadlock. The social pressure, the performance, the need to maintain the facade I'd built over the last few days of jokes and innuendo, I was pinned against an invisible wall with her whole body wrapped around me. Frozen in an alternate universe, literally stuck there, paralyzed with a boner I couldn't hide. The playful teasing had become a high-stakes reality. My shield was dropped when I sent the text message, and her response left no recovery option at the speed she operated. I was completely, totally, fucked. This didn’t start out as a book. It started out as a Facebook manifesto rant to set the record straight before I followed through with a very stupid and very illegal revenge fantasy where I would slay all the main villains in the last chapter and nobody would have to ask why I did it. Insane? No. Crazy? Yes. Evil? Only for the three minutes it took to formulate the plan and decide on the method. Pistol, one clip, motorcycle, nine AM Tuesday morning. Like I was efficient or something. I don't waste any time doing the stupid shit: the time is wasted in between the bad idea and the decision to do it. Three minutes was all it took to hand my mind over to evil and decide it was justified, worth it, and final. But those same three minutes cracked something open: a raw, rage-fueled state of mind that didn't simulate those emotions, it inhabited them. Nothing cold and calculated about it. And without that murderer's intent locked in and sustained, the internal censor that keeps damaging truths private would have buried this confession before it ever became a weapon. The hard part was focusing on the problem without fixing it. It was something I used to give less productive workers shit about on jobsites. They'd come running to me focused on the problem instead of the solution, what caused it, whose fault it was, why it had them stuck, reporting it like it deserved attention instead of resolution. Here's the part that always got me: if I asked what they'd do if I wasn't there, the solution was the first thing out of their mouth. To me, that was the real problem. And I had a name for it. Defective mindset. Something I loathed so much it had zero chance of survival if it showed up anywhere on my radar. I was like a sniper waiting for the opportunity to deliver correction with brutal efficiency, enjoying the verbal kill shot whenever it presented itself. I saw it as infectious, dangerous for those wi
16quipment for the book records." The request itself seemed old-fashioned. I'd bought most of my machines from out of state dealerships, without ever stepping foot inside, and had all the paperwork she could possibly need. Not to mention pictures posted on Facebook. Every receipt, every title, every maintenance record was already in her possession, neatly organized in the folders I'd delivered weeks earlier. But she made the request with a stone-faced professionalism right in front of my crew, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was a calculated move, theater that played directly into the jokes they'd already been snickering about like schoolgirls. I played along with them too, never expecting for a second that anything would actually fucking happen. "Sure," I replied, maintaining the professional facade. "But it'll have to be at night. That's the only time the equipment and I are ever there at the same time." She didn't flinch. Her expression didn't change. "Okay, let me know when." "I don't know," I said, shrugging, trying to keep it casual. "Maybe Monday or Tuesday." The moment the words left my mouth, everyone on the crew was watching. The air shifted, like a contract had been signed. This was no longer a business request; it had transformed into something else entirely, like a challenge had been accepted, written in testosterone and innuendo. In their eyes, the boss was being called out. It was funny, so I played along, leaning into the joke, grinning along with their reactions. Surely this woman, this client, this professional CPA with her license and her office and her reputation, couldn't actually be trying to orchestrate an affair. Not with her husband a few feet away inside the house, probably watching football or scrolling through his phone. The thought was absurd, ridiculously improbable. But the seed was planted, and my crew watered it religiously. They turned into a full-time peanut gallery of jokes and speculation, their commentary running like a sitcom laugh track in the background of every interaction. "Boss is gonna get some equipment inventoried," and "Hope she brings her measuring tape." I egged it on, talking the big dick talk, the guy who could handle anything. In the back of my mind, it was just a game. A harmless flirtation. This couldn't be real. Reality had guardrails, and we were nowhere near them. Later that week, caught up in the momentum of the joke, riding the wave of my crew's expectations and my own ego, I decided to call her bluff. I sent her a text, a jab designed to push the absurdity to its limit and force her to back
13rned into a full-time peanut gallery of jokes and speculation, their commentary running like a sitcom laugh track in the background of every interaction. "Boss is gonna get some equipment inventoried," and "Hope she brings her measuring tape." I egged it on, talking the big dick talk, the guy who could handle anything. In the back of my mind, it was just a game. A harmless flirtation. This couldn't be real. Reality had guardrails, and we were nowhere near them. Later that week, caught up in the momentum of the joke, riding the wave of my crew's expectations and my own ego, I decided to call her bluff. I sent her a text, a jab designed to push the absurdity to its limit and force her to back down, to acknowledge that we were just playing around. "Still coming to my yard to consummate my equipment with my return?" I hit send and laughed. The whole thing felt like a screenplay unfolding in real time; all the pieces were there, the bored housewife, the oblivious husband, the contractor with calloused hands and a swagger, but it seemed too coincidental to be reality, just one of those parallel storylines of innuendo that can exist in any human interaction without ever becoming tangible. Not today. Today I had just made a bluff on the wrong woman. Five minutes later, she came walking through the front gate. Just like on demo day when Jason had called her, she appeared shortly after, summoned by a challenge. She strode onto the job site like a predator returning to her hunting ground, all smiles, telling me everything I needed to know: she'd been waiting for this. My crew went silent. She walked into the middle of the site, her eyes locked on mine, closing the distance with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. "You used that word," she said, wearing an ear to ear smile. I looked at her and just smirked, thinking *I sure did now what?* Then, in one fluid motion, she turned slightly to the side with her backside aimed towards me. She reached back with one hand, grabbed the flesh of her own ass cheek through her skirt, lifted it provocatively, and let it drop with a soft jiggle and a giggle that sounded like a victory dance. My body reacted before my brain could catch up. A surge shot through me: adrenaline, testosterone, shock, arousal, all of it hitting simultaneously like a drug injected directly into my brainstem. An instant, rock-hard erection almost ripped through my Carhartts. And everyone was looking. Before I could process, before I could formulate a response or a retreat, she closed the distance. One step. Two steps. Three. An
14 dating service from her accounting office, completely deaf to the fact I had already told her, multiple times, that I was in a committed relationship. She had a talent for opening doors no one knocked on, for dragging inappropriate topics into the room and treating them as casually as comments on the weather. It was a shameless maneuver, off base against every professional conversation we'd ever had. It was the first clear sign that the standard rules of engagement didn't apply to her; she was operating from a different playbook entirely. I should have recognized it for what it was: reconnaissance. She was testing my boundaries, gauging my responses, probing angles, mapping the terrain before the real campaign began. Once we were on-site, the probing became more direct, more aggressive, but never so direct that it was beyond the point of plausible deniability. She was sixteen years older, so she had that angle too, the one she could fall back on easily and pretend she didn't have a soaking wet hole she was trying to stuff. She was an artist when it came to teetering on the line of inappropriateness, while keeping her innuendos within a professional context so that she could always fall back on the facade of innocence. She was a master at setting up opportunities to open forbidden doors. So I deployed the armor. Full force. Over and over. Shari, my angel. My girl. What Shari and I had planned that weekend. How long we'd been together. I worked her name into every opening she left me, and when she didn't leave one, I made one. With any other woman, that was the end of it. The conversation would pivot back to concrete, to project specifications, to business. The flirtation would deflate like a punctured tire, and we'd move on. But with Bianca, it was like firing a blank into the void. The words left my mouth, traveled the distance between us, and simply... evaporated. They had no impact whatsoever. She just kept coming. She ignored the boundary entirely, bulldozing the conversation into whatever territory she desired, as if my relationship was nothing more than a minor inconvenience to be worked around. "That's sweet," she'd say, her smile never wavering. "Shari's a lucky girl." And then she'd continue whatever line of conversation she'd been pursuing, as if I hadn't spoken at all. I didn't know how to respond to that. This was uncharted ground. In my years running a business, dealing with clients, I'd never encountered someone who so blatantly refused to acknowledge clearly stated boundaries. You have to understand my personality here. I was cocky, genuin
11hey had no impact whatsoever. She just kept coming. She ignored the boundary entirely, bulldozing the conversation into whatever territory she desired, as if my relationship was nothing more than a minor inconvenience to be worked around. "That's sweet," she'd say, her smile never wavering. "Shari's a lucky girl." And then she'd continue whatever line of conversation she'd been pursuing, as if I hadn't spoken at all. I didn't know how to respond to that. This was uncharted ground. In my years running a business, dealing with clients, I'd never encountered someone who so blatantly refused to acknowledge clearly stated boundaries. You have to understand my personality here. I was cocky, genuinely bragging, and for some reason she took it as a challenge, like we were in a pissing contest. Then she'd just dissociate from the whole conversation. I was on her turf, playing a high-stakes game where she held the only card that mattered: my taxes. I had everything riding on this job. I was under the biggest guillotine blade yet, and she was the only thing keeping my neck out from under it. I was there for one thing: to get my finances in order and to deliver a product beyond her expectations so my side of the barter would be beyond question. Then came the move that shifted the entire game from probing to a full-on campaign, the moment when subtlety gave way to strategy. She came out to the site one afternoon, her tablet in hand, her expression serious and professional. She looked like she was deep in the weeds of my financials, reviewing spreadsheets and depreciation schedules. My crew was working around us, the familiar racket of power tools and rock radio. Her husband's security cameras watched everything, recording lights blinking their steady rhythm. "I need to stop by your yard," she announced, her tone all business, completely flat. "I need to take an inventory of your equipment for the book records." The request itself seemed old-fashioned. I'd bought most of my machines from out of state dealerships, without ever stepping foot inside, and had all the paperwork she could possibly need. Not to mention pictures posted on Facebook. Every receipt, every title, every maintenance record was already in her possession, neatly organized in the folders I'd delivered weeks earlier. But she made the request with a stone-faced professionalism right in front of my crew, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was a calculated move, theater that played directly into the jokes they'd already been snickering about like schoolgirls. I played along with them too, never expectin
12ch and so out would come the rifle. I completely ditched the rifle on myself. Instead, I leaned into the defective mindset, hard, feeding it everything it wanted, daily, until it became something else entirely more dangerous. A memoir. Hypocrite? Sure, I'll own that one. It's called the sword of truth for a reason and mine happens to be razor sharp and double-edged. It cuts both ways indiscriminately with total recall until nobody's left standing, including me. The writing process served as an effective coping mechanism: a way to process what happened and even learn more about myself. An opportunity for growth through honest reflection at the end of the day. But before that can happen, the blood must be shed. With that said, demolition day has always been my favorite day on the job: I'm extraordinarily efficient at it, and unlike most honest work, it's always fun Be warned. I removed the governor, stripped the safety censors, and said my last prayers like a kamikaze nearing the moment of impact. That intensity is sustained throughout the book. There is nothing pretty ahead. Final warning.Shari was more than a trophy. More than a perfect fit. More than the one I bragged about nonstop to anyone in the room. She was my armor. In a world full of bored, wealthy housewives and their casual temptations, women who saw contractors as convenient diversions from their manicured monotony, her name was the shutdown command. Say it once and the conversation went back to concrete. A wall that had never been breached in all the years we'd been together. I was proud to be the guy who, unlike so many others in this industry, went home to the same woman every night. That mattered to me. It meant something. My company was like my only child, something I was willing to lay my life down for, something I'd poured every ounce of sweat and obsession into building. One of the side-effects of the assisted slow-roll of the summer was the isolation it created. I was fully consumed on jobsites, either undermanned or completely solo, stuck working late into the evenings while the summer sun stretched out its dying light. That relentless grind cheated us of our time together and left me exposed in ways I was about to realize too late. If I could go back in time, I would have traded it all for Shari. I never imagined a life without both. She didn't deserve what was about to happen. It started with quiet, probing attacks, so subtle at first I almost missed them entirely. I remember a phone call, weeks before her job started, when we were still in the planning phase. We were talking about
9he assisted slow-roll of the summer was the isolation it created. I was fully consumed on jobsites, either undermanned or completely solo, stuck working late into the evenings while the summer sun stretched out its dying light. That relentless grind cheated us of our time together and left me exposed in ways I was about to realize too late. If I could go back in time, I would have traded it all for Shari. I never imagined a life without both. She didn't deserve what was about to happen. It started with quiet, probing attacks, so subtle at first I almost missed them entirely. I remember a phone call, weeks before her job started, when we were still in the planning phase. We were talking about logistics, suppliers, equipment access, the usual dance of coordinating a major project, then my books entered the room. The conversation about my books was the only opening she needed. She used it as a professional pretext to shift the focus to her own operation, bringing up her cousin, Sarah, who handled her bookkeeping department. "You know, Sarah's single," she'd said out of nowhere, her voice laced with an awkward matchmaking enthusiasm that caught me completely off guard. "She's not really dating right now... she's a little self-conscious about her figure." Looking back, that detail was the hook, baited and dropped right in front of me. It naturally made me curious about who this Sarah was, what she looked like, whether the self-consciousness was warranted. It was a deliberate seed planted in Bianca's weird world of sexual agendas. The bit about the figure was probably her own insecurity talking, dressed up in her cousin's name. I realize now she was testing, seeking information, trying to find the line. Feeling out whether I was a piece of shit willing to play on the side. The whole exchange was bizarre. It turned from a professional call into feeling like she was running a dating service from her accounting office, completely deaf to the fact I had already told her, multiple times, that I was in a committed relationship. She had a talent for opening doors no one knocked on, for dragging inappropriate topics into the room and treating them as casually as comments on the weather. It was a shameless maneuver, off base against every professional conversation we'd ever had. It was the first clear sign that the standard rules of engagement didn't apply to her; she was operating from a different playbook entirely. I should have recognized it for what it was: reconnaissance. She was testing my boundaries, gauging my responses, probing angles, mapping the terrain befo
10t. Right in front of the web of security cameras her husband had surrounding the property, their recording lights blinking in my peripheral vision. Right there, with him just inside the house, maybe ten yards away, separated by nothing but shingle siding and drywall. His ignorance questionable. It was insane. It was an ambush. It was checkmate. My mind exploded into alarm bells, each one ringing a different warning. *Fuck, this is in front of my guys. I can't back down now. I've been egging this shit on, talking the big talk, playing the game. If I push her off, I'm a pussy. If I don't, I'm betraying Shari. The cameras, fuck, the cameras are recording this. Her husband. The audit. My reputation. My relationship. Everything is on the line right now, in this moment...* Too late to turn back now. That was the problem. My hands hovered uselessly at my sides, caught between steadying her and pushing her away, doing neither. The bitch had me in a deadlock. The social pressure, the performance, the need to maintain the facade I'd built over the last few days of jokes and innuendo, I was pinned against an invisible wall with her whole body wrapped around me. Frozen in an alternate universe, literally stuck there, paralyzed with a boner I couldn't hide. The playful teasing had become a high-stakes reality. My shield was dropped when I sent the text message, and her response left no recovery option at the speed she operated. I was completely, totally, fucked. This didn’t start out as a book. It started out as a Facebook manifesto rant to set the record straight before I followed through with a very stupid and very illegal revenge fantasy where I would slay all the main villains in the last chapter and nobody would have to ask why I did it. Insane? No. Crazy? Yes. Evil? Only for the three minutes it took to formulate the plan and decide on the method. Pistol, one clip, motorcycle, nine AM Tuesday morning. Like I was efficient or something. I don't waste any time doing the stupid shit: the time is wasted in between the bad idea and the decision to do it. Three minutes was all it took to hand my mind over to evil and decide it was justified, worth it, and final. But those same three minutes cracked something open: a raw, rage-fueled state of mind that didn't simulate those emotions, it inhabited them. Nothing cold and calculated about it. And without that murderer's intent locked in and sustained, the internal censor that keeps damaging truths private would have buried this confession before it ever became a weapon. The hard part was focusing on the problem without f
7e, nine AM Tuesday morning. Like I was efficient or something. I don't waste any time doing the stupid shit: the time is wasted in between the bad idea and the decision to do it. Three minutes was all it took to hand my mind over to evil and decide it was justified, worth it, and final. But those same three minutes cracked something open: a raw, rage-fueled state of mind that didn't simulate those emotions, it inhabited them. Nothing cold and calculated about it. And without that murderer's intent locked in and sustained, the internal censor that keeps damaging truths private would have buried this confession before it ever became a weapon. The hard part was focusing on the problem without fixing it. It was something I used to give less productive workers shit about on jobsites. They'd come running to me focused on the problem instead of the solution, what caused it, whose fault it was, why it had them stuck, reporting it like it deserved attention instead of resolution. Here's the part that always got me: if I asked what they'd do if I wasn't there, the solution was the first thing out of their mouth. To me, that was the real problem. And I had a name for it. Defective mindset. Something I loathed so much it had zero chance of survival if it showed up anywhere on my radar. I was like a sniper waiting for the opportunity to deliver correction with brutal efficiency, enjoying the verbal kill shot whenever it presented itself. I saw it as infectious, dangerous for those with compromised mental immune systems. All it took was one idiot to cough that contagious shit into the air and they'd start dropping like flies. Next thing you know, instead of working, they're standing around trading opinions like sports anchors listing stats on a highlight reel, while the clock keeps running and nothing actually gets done. Something my wallet's never-satisfied appetite couldn't stomach and so out would come the rifle. I completely ditched the rifle on myself. Instead, I leaned into the defective mindset, hard, feeding it everything it wanted, daily, until it became something else entirely more dangerous. A memoir. Hypocrite? Sure, I'll own that one. It's called the sword of truth for a reason and mine happens to be razor sharp and double-edged. It cuts both ways indiscriminately with total recall until nobody's left standing, including me. The writing process served as an effective coping mechanism: a way to process what happened and even learn more about myself. An opportunity for growth through honest reflection at the end of the day. But before that can happen, the b
8s left my mouth, everyone on the crew was watching. The air shifted, like a contract had been signed. This was no longer a business request; it had transformed into something else entirely, like a challenge had been accepted, written in testosterone and innuendo. In their eyes, the boss was being called out. It was funny, so I played along, leaning into the joke, grinning along with their reactions. Surely this woman, this client, this professional CPA with her license and her office and her reputation, couldn't actually be trying to orchestrate an affair. Not with her husband a few feet away inside the house, probably watching football or scrolling through his phone. The thought was absurd, ridiculously improbable. But the seed was planted, and my crew watered it religiously. They turned into a full-time peanut gallery of jokes and speculation, their commentary running like a sitcom laugh track in the background of every interaction. "Boss is gonna get some equipment inventoried," and "Hope she brings her measuring tape." I egged it on, talking the big dick talk, the guy who could handle anything. In the back of my mind, it was just a game. A harmless flirtation. This couldn't be real. Reality had guardrails, and we were nowhere near them. Later that week, caught up in the momentum of the joke, riding the wave of my crew's expectations and my own ego, I decided to call her bluff. I sent her a text, a jab designed to push the absurdity to its limit and force her to back down, to acknowledge that we were just playing around. "Still coming to my yard to consummate my equipment with my return?" I hit send and laughed. The whole thing felt like a screenplay unfolding in real time; all the pieces were there, the bored housewife, the oblivious husband, the contractor with calloused hands and a swagger, but it seemed too coincidental to be reality, just one of those parallel storylines of innuendo that can exist in any human interaction without ever becoming tangible. Not today. Today I had just made a bluff on the wrong woman. Five minutes later, she came walking through the front gate. Just like on demo day when Jason had called her, she appeared shortly after, summoned by a challenge. She strode onto the job site like a predator returning to her hunting ground, all smiles, telling me everything I needed to know: she'd been waiting for this. My crew went silent. She walked into the middle of the site, her eyes locked on mine, closing the distance with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. "You used that word," she said, wearing an e
5 storylines of innuendo that can exist in any human interaction without ever becoming tangible. Not today. Today I had just made a bluff on the wrong woman. Five minutes later, she came walking through the front gate. Just like on demo day when Jason had called her, she appeared shortly after, summoned by a challenge. She strode onto the job site like a predator returning to her hunting ground, all smiles, telling me everything I needed to know: she'd been waiting for this. My crew went silent. She walked into the middle of the site, her eyes locked on mine, closing the distance with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. "You used that word," she said, wearing an ear to ear smile. I looked at her and just smirked, thinking *I sure did now what?* Then, in one fluid motion, she turned slightly to the side with her backside aimed towards me. She reached back with one hand, grabbed the flesh of her own ass cheek through her skirt, lifted it provocatively, and let it drop with a soft jiggle and a giggle that sounded like a victory dance. My body reacted before my brain could catch up. A surge shot through me: adrenaline, testosterone, shock, arousal, all of it hitting simultaneously like a drug injected directly into my brainstem. An instant, rock-hard erection almost ripped through my Carhartts. And everyone was looking. Before I could process, before I could formulate a response or a retreat, she closed the distance. One step. Two steps. Three. And then she literally jumped on top of me. Her arms wrapped around my neck. Her legs circled my waist. Her body pressed against mine with undeniable intention. The scent of her perfume mixed with jobsite dust and sweat. Her breathing was against my ear. Right there in the open. Right in front of my crew, who stood frozen like they were watching a nature documentary, their eyes wide, watching in amazement. Right in front of the web of security cameras her husband had surrounding the property, their recording lights blinking in my peripheral vision. Right there, with him just inside the house, maybe ten yards away, separated by nothing but shingle siding and drywall. His ignorance questionable. It was insane. It was an ambush. It was checkmate. My mind exploded into alarm bells, each one ringing a different warning. *Fuck, this is in front of my guys. I can't back down now. I've been egging this shit on, talking the big talk, playing the game. If I push her off, I'm a pussy. If I don't, I'm betraying Shari. The cameras, fuck, the cameras are recording this. Her husband. The audit. My reputat
6opriateness, while keeping her innuendos within a professional context so that she could always fall back on the facade of innocence. She was a master at setting up opportunities to open forbidden doors. So I deployed the armor. Full force. Over and over. Shari, my angel. My girl. What Shari and I had planned that weekend. How long we'd been together. I worked her name into every opening she left me, and when she didn't leave one, I made one. With any other woman, that was the end of it. The conversation would pivot back to concrete, to project specifications, to business. The flirtation would deflate like a punctured tire, and we'd move on. But with Bianca, it was like firing a blank into the void. The words left my mouth, traveled the distance between us, and simply... evaporated. They had no impact whatsoever. She just kept coming. She ignored the boundary entirely, bulldozing the conversation into whatever territory she desired, as if my relationship was nothing more than a minor inconvenience to be worked around. "That's sweet," she'd say, her smile never wavering. "Shari's a lucky girl." And then she'd continue whatever line of conversation she'd been pursuing, as if I hadn't spoken at all. I didn't know how to respond to that. This was uncharted ground. In my years running a business, dealing with clients, I'd never encountered someone who so blatantly refused to acknowledge clearly stated boundaries. You have to understand my personality here. I was cocky, genuinely bragging, and for some reason she took it as a challenge, like we were in a pissing contest. Then she'd just dissociate from the whole conversation. I was on her turf, playing a high-stakes game where she held the only card that mattered: my taxes. I had everything riding on this job. I was under the biggest guillotine blade yet, and she was the only thing keeping my neck out from under it. I was there for one thing: to get my finances in order and to deliver a product beyond her expectations so my side of the barter would be beyond question. Then came the move that shifted the entire game from probing to a full-on campaign, the moment when subtlety gave way to strategy. She came out to the site one afternoon, her tablet in hand, her expression serious and professional. She looked like she was deep in the weeds of my financials, reviewing spreadsheets and depreciation schedules. My crew was working around us, the familiar racket of power tools and rock radio. Her husband's security cameras watched everything, recording lights blinking their steady rhythm. "I need to stop by your yard,
3here for one thing: to get my finances in order and to deliver a product beyond her expectations so my side of the barter would be beyond question. Then came the move that shifted the entire game from probing to a full-on campaign, the moment when subtlety gave way to strategy. She came out to the site one afternoon, her tablet in hand, her expression serious and professional. She looked like she was deep in the weeds of my financials, reviewing spreadsheets and depreciation schedules. My crew was working around us, the familiar racket of power tools and rock radio. Her husband's security cameras watched everything, recording lights blinking their steady rhythm. "I need to stop by your yard," she announced, her tone all business, completely flat. "I need to take an inventory of your equipment for the book records." The request itself seemed old-fashioned. I'd bought most of my machines from out of state dealerships, without ever stepping foot inside, and had all the paperwork she could possibly need. Not to mention pictures posted on Facebook. Every receipt, every title, every maintenance record was already in her possession, neatly organized in the folders I'd delivered weeks earlier. But she made the request with a stone-faced professionalism right in front of my crew, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was a calculated move, theater that played directly into the jokes they'd already been snickering about like schoolgirls. I played along with them too, never expecting for a second that anything would actually fucking happen. "Sure," I replied, maintaining the professional facade. "But it'll have to be at night. That's the only time the equipment and I are ever there at the same time." She didn't flinch. Her expression didn't change. "Okay, let me know when." "I don't know," I said, shrugging, trying to keep it casual. "Maybe Monday or Tuesday." The moment the words left my mouth, everyone on the crew was watching. The air shifted, like a contract had been signed. This was no longer a business request; it had transformed into something else entirely, like a challenge had been accepted, written in testosterone and innuendo. In their eyes, the boss was being called out. It was funny, so I played along, leaning into the joke, grinning along with their reactions. Surely this woman, this client, this professional CPA with her license and her office and her reputation, couldn't actually be trying to orchestrate an affair. Not with her husband a few feet away inside the house, probably watching football or scrolling through his phone. The thought was absurd,
4Shari was more than a trophy. More than a perfect fit. More than the one I bragged about nonstop to anyone in the room. She was my armor. In a world full of bored, wealthy housewives and their casual temptations, women who saw contractors as convenient diversions from their manicured monotony, her name was the shutdown command. Say it once and the conversation went back to concrete. A wall that had never been breached in all the years we'd been together. I was proud to be the guy who, unlike so many others in this industry, went home to the same woman every night. That mattered to me. It meant something. My company was like my only child, something I was willing to lay my life down for, something I'd poured every ounce of sweat and obsession into building. One of the side-effects of the assisted slow-roll of the summer was the isolation it created. I was fully consumed on jobsites, either undermanned or completely solo, stuck working late into the evenings while the summer sun stretched out its dying light. That relentless grind cheated us of our time together and left me exposed in ways I was about to realize too late. If I could go back in time, I would have traded it all for Shari. I never imagined a life without both. She didn't deserve what was about to happen. It started with quiet, probing attacks, so subtle at first I almost missed them entirely. I remember a phone call, weeks before her job started, when we were still in the planning phase. We were talking about logistics, suppliers, equipment access, the usual dance of coordinating a major project, then my books entered the room. The conversation about my books was the only opening she needed. She used it as a professional pretext to shift the focus to her own operation, bringing up her cousin, Sarah, who handled her bookkeeping department. "You know, Sarah's single," she'd said out of nowhere, her voice laced with an awkward matchmaking enthusiasm that caught me completely off guard. "She's not really dating right now... she's a little self-conscious about her figure." Looking back, that detail was the hook, baited and dropped right in front of me. It naturally made me curious about who this Sarah was, what she looked like, whether the self-consciousness was warranted. It was a deliberate seed planted in Bianca's weird world of sexual agendas. The bit about the figure was probably her own insecurity talking, dressed up in her cousin's name. I realize now she was testing, seeking information, trying to find the line. Feeling out whether I was a piece of shit willing to play on the side. The who
1ed with an awkward matchmaking enthusiasm that caught me completely off guard. "She's not really dating right now... she's a little self-conscious about her figure." Looking back, that detail was the hook, baited and dropped right in front of me. It naturally made me curious about who this Sarah was, what she looked like, whether the self-consciousness was warranted. It was a deliberate seed planted in Bianca's weird world of sexual agendas. The bit about the figure was probably her own insecurity talking, dressed up in her cousin's name. I realize now she was testing, seeking information, trying to find the line. Feeling out whether I was a piece of shit willing to play on the side. The whole exchange was bizarre. It turned from a professional call into feeling like she was running a dating service from her accounting office, completely deaf to the fact I had already told her, multiple times, that I was in a committed relationship. She had a talent for opening doors no one knocked on, for dragging inappropriate topics into the room and treating them as casually as comments on the weather. It was a shameless maneuver, off base against every professional conversation we'd ever had. It was the first clear sign that the standard rules of engagement didn't apply to her; she was operating from a different playbook entirely. I should have recognized it for what it was: reconnaissance. She was testing my boundaries, gauging my responses, probing angles, mapping the terrain before the real campaign began. Once we were on-site, the probing became more direct, more aggressive, but never so direct that it was beyond the point of plausible deniability. She was sixteen years older, so she had that angle too, the one she could fall back on easily and pretend she didn't have a soaking wet hole she was trying to stuff. She was an artist when it came to teetering on the line of inappropriateness, while keeping her innuendos within a professional context so that she could always fall back on the facade of innocence. She was a master at setting up opportunities to open forbidden doors. So I deployed the armor. Full force. Over and over. Shari, my angel. My girl. What Shari and I had planned that weekend. How long we'd been together. I worked her name into every opening she left me, and when she didn't leave one, I made one. With any other woman, that was the end of it. The conversation would pivot back to concrete, to project specifications, to business. The flirtation would deflate like a punctured tire, and we'd move on. But with Bianca, it was like firing a blank into t
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