She glared.

He unfolded the blade, knelt by her right foot, slipped the tip between zip tie and tape and cut the zip tie free. Tension released. With just the tape, she had stretch and room to move. That was a start.

He said, “I’ve watched you work, Julia, and I spent days pent up with Robert, forced to listen to him pine for you. I know you far better than one stranger has a right to know another.” He stepped around to the other side of the bed. “There are a handful of people in this world capable of understanding what we’ve lived and how we think, even fewer who’d accept that truth exactly as it is. That matters for something.”

He cut through the zip tie on her right foot and, as with the first, left the tape in place. “I hated your brother’s plan,” he said. “Hated it on principle, hated the unfairness to you. But mostly, I hated it because any hope of friendship is impossible so long as I’m considered a tool and a weapon in your sibling war.”

He sliced through the tape that bound her thighs and chest.

“I didn’t care that he tried to play me, I cared that he tried to play me against you. What I wanted was his word. I wanted off his board for good.”

He reached for her left hand, cut the zip tie, moved back around to her right, and did the same there. “I upheld my end of the deal,” he said. “So now, here we are.”

She rolled her eyes and met his gaze.

He snapped the knife closed.

He’d cut the zip ties, but she was still taped to the bed.

“A quarter-inch strip,” he said. He motioned from hand to foot with the knife. “Leave the rest of you like that and cut your left hand mostly free. A quarter-inch strip will buy me all the time I need to clear the room before you get loose. Gun’s on the other side of the bed. By the time you reach it and aim for the door, I’ll be gone. So the question I’m asking myself is, Do I act the fool and stick around, hoping you want a friend as much as I do, or do I walk now and spend the rest of my life thinking back on this moment, wondering what might have been if I’d remained?”

She shut her eyes to block him out.

This vulnerable honesty thing he did made it really damn hard to stay angry.