“No, no,” Robby said, a hand covering half his face. “Oh, that’s not it at all. I didn’t want things to get to this. I just… I wanted you, Noah. I’ve wanted you ever since you showed me the true meaning of happiness. I connected with you on a level I’ve never felt, not with anyone. But I knew you’d need more work to see it. You’d need something to push yourself into my open arms.

“So when I started seeing Franky—well, I got an idea.”

That admission made my head spin, as if a bucket of ice had been dropped from above me. “You and Franky were together?”

That explained how he got Franky’s car, how he was able to shift some of the suspicion in the opposite direction.

“Oh yeah. I caught him one day after he was leaving your place. Even when you two were secretly together, he was fucking around with other men. So much for being in a closet—Franky’s hiding out in a warehouse. And he’s still angry about it. He’s still very resentful, more so now that he’s with his wife. And he’d also always talk about you, to the point that it made me jealous. But not because he still wanted you, but because I wasn’t the only one who fell for your spell.”

I swallowed, my mind racing to process this information while trying to come up with a way out of this. How the hell were Jake and I going to make it through tonight in one piece? I had little to no fighting skills, and neither of us was armed.

But maybe I could talk my way out of this…

And if that didn’t work, maybe me secretly working at undoing Jake’s knot would help.

“So you made up that fake threat with the chicken head. You thought you’d pin it on Franky and I’d come running into your arms for support that night. But you weren’t counting on Jake being over.”

“No, I wasn’t counting on Jake at all. When he entered the picture, I thought I could cut him out of it. Leave you mourning after your boyfriend overdosed on a bad batch of fentanyl-laced coke. Injected into the system, it would show up the same as if he snorted it. I thought that would do the trick.”

I avoided the urge to look down as my fingers dug into the thick rope, trying to find the areas with the most amount of slack, tugging and tugging without moving a single muscle in my arm, only my hand.

“That was the night you tried breaking into my house?” Jake asked.