Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CHEF WHO NOTICES EVERYTHING (ESPECIALLY THE THINGS HE WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HEAR)
H e should have been asleep.
The staff quarters ran along the north corridor—windowless, cool, close to the kitchen the way he preferred.
After the last staff member had left and his guest settled in her quarters, he spent time in his office making notes on the service and recipes in his ledger.
The caves were quiet. The geothermal vents breathed their slow, mineral exhale.
The whole underground world had gone still in the deep hours of that June night, that narrow pocket of actual darkness that summer permitted, grudging and brief, the quiet he normally enjoyed. But this time it felt stifling.
He didn’t normally stay at the restaurant.
He had his own cave on the other side of the mountain and he used the internal tunnels, unknown to the staff, to head for home.
But if any member of the staff stayed, he did also.
He had his own space at the end of the hall.
The one with a door that didn't quite seal, that let in a thin ribbon of kitchen warmth.
It was practical—closer to the walk-in cold room if the temperature monitors tripped, closer to the herb station if inspiration struck at four in the morning, which it sometimes did .
He had Sigrid put Elise in the room across from him. He said it was to keep an eye on her. He didn’t want to admit that something demanded he keep her close.
He lay on his back in the dark and stared at the ceiling of carved volcanic stone and listened to the cave breathe around him. The mate bond hummed under his sternum like a coal that wouldn't go cold.
He'd been feeling it since he’d met her—that maddening warmth that had nothing to do with the ovens and everything to do with the woman standing too close to his prep station. He'd recognized it from how his brothers had described their awareness that they had met their mates.
No. She wasn’t his mate. She was here for three days and then she was off to her next adventure, while he would remain cave-bound. They were too different. She needed space and new places, while he was content in his restaurant and his cave, experimenting with his recipes.
He settled against the pillow and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the hum in his chest.
And then he heard her door open.
It was soft, but troll hearing was acute, and the stone corridor carried sound. Her footsteps were careful. Stocking feet on cold rock, light and quick, heading not toward the kitchen but past it, through the inner arch, toward the dining room.
He was out of bed before he'd realized it.
T he restaurant was dark except for the ambient glow that came through the western windows from the night sky.
In June, in Iceland, there were a few dark hours when the sun was down. The sky was dark, with the moon and stars casting a cool light onto the rocks below. The Atlantic stretched out below the cliff face, the water pewter-colored and slow. The waves were very quiet.
She was standing at the far end of the room, at the broad windows that faced due west, her back to him.
The sweater was enormous on her. It fell to mid-thigh, the gray wool gone soft in the dim light.
Her hair was down, and it fell between her shoulder blades in a dark wave.
She had her arms wrapped around herself and she was looking out at the water standing so still that she appeared to be a statue.
Stenrik stopped in the archway.
He’d meant to say something. Announce himself. Make some noise the way you were supposed to when a person didn’t know you were there. Instead, he stared at her and the mate bond thrummed, tugging him towards her.
Oh .
Oh, you absolute idiot of a troll .
He’d suspected, hadn’t he? Denial wouldn’t help. Not anymore.
He moved into the room, keeping to the edge where the windows began. She must have sensed him coming because she spoke softly, not even turning.
“Stenrik.”
Not alarmed. Just his name, in her voice, at three in the morning. As though she’d been expecting him, or had stopped being surprised by him.
“Elise.” He came to stand beside her at the window, a careful arm’s length away, and looked out at the sea. “You couldn’t sleep.”
“Overtired, maybe.” She said it lightly, but he heard something else underneath.
“Maybe,” he said.
She turned back to the window. For a while neither of them said anything. The light outside was that impossible Icelandic half-dark, rose-gold along the horizon line, the water below it holding every color at once.
“It’s dark,” she said. “I thought it was twenty-four hours of sunlight during the summer.”
“About three hours of it, this time of year.” He glanced sideways at her. “Midnight to three. Give or take.”
“I saw that you stayed…” She stopped, clearly unsure how to ask what she wanted to.
He leaned on the railing. “I built the restaurant west-facing so the sun would only shine in at sunset. The customers love it and can see the lights across the water,” he said. “But I had to add tints and UV filters to the windows for me.”
She was quiet for a moment. “For presentation or something else?”
He arched an eyebrow at her. “Elise, didn’t you do your homework?”
That earned him a look—quick, sideways, the corner of her mouth moving. Not quite a smile but close enough that he felt it in his heart. “I did but you’re very reclusive. There isn’t much about you.”
“Or about my kind?” He flashed a quick smile. “I’m a troll. We can’t walk in sunlight or we turn to stone.”
“None of you? I know you have siblings beyond Torfi. You have an artist in the family and there are pictures of him at the market, in daylight. So, how does this work?”
“Yes, Gunnar is mated, as is my brother Ketill. Once a troll finds their true mate and completes the bond, then they can walk in sunlight.”
Her brow furrowed. “Mates? Is that like a wife?”
“Deeper. It’s a fated bond, a soul-deep connection binding two people together.” Even talking about it was painful. When Gunnar and Ketill talked about their mating, they said their mates felt the bond too. He didn’t believe Elise felt anything. If she had, there would be indications.
“And you feel this somehow?”
“Both sides of the bond feel it, though the troll feels it more strongly.”
She looked up at him, her eyes soft in the night. “Have you ever felt the bond?”
“How about some hot cocoa to help you sleep?”
Without waiting for a response, he headed for the kitchen, feeling her gaze heavy on his back.
H e made the hot chocolate with his hidden stash of Belgium chocolate, melting it in the warm milk over the stove.
He poured it into heavy ceramic mugs made by a local artisan and carried them to a bench by the far windows and settled in next to her, the sea spread out below them in the Icelandic dark.
The cocoa was good. It was always good. He didn’t make things that weren’t.
But his heart was soothed when she cupped her hands around the mug and sighed in pure pleasure.
She held her mug in both hands and tipped her head back against the stone wall and he watched her breathe — slow, even, the tight quality from earlier gone out of her.
“Tell me how you started,” he said.
She looked at him sideways. “The channel?”
“The food. How you came to care about it.”
A pause as if considering how much to share.
“My grandmother,” she said finally. “She loved cooking shows and loved to cook. She took it seriously, but she also had fun with it. She said recipes were guidelines. Each cook added their own flair and you had to find it.” She turned her mug in her hands.
“We’d spend whole Saturdays in her kitchen, preparing for Sunday dinner.
I was maybe six, seven. She’d make me taste everything.
Not to teach me, exactly—she wasn’t trying to make me a cook.
She just believed that if you paid attention to what you were eating, you were paying attention to the world.
You were present. And you could learn the person who made the food. ”
He said nothing.
“She died when I was twelve. And I realized that was the main thing she left me. Not objects. Just the way of tasting. The habit of paying attention.” A slight movement of her shoulder. “So I kept doing it. And eventually it became something else. Something I built a life around.”
The sea shifted below them. The light outside had gone that deepest blue, the horizon barely distinguishable from water.
“My mother fed the mountain,” Stenrik said.
Elise turned to look at him, fully this time.
“Gryla. You’ve heard us talk about her.” He kept his gaze on the window.
“She would cook at Yule—not for guests, not for ceremony. For us. Thirteen sons. She’d start days before.
The cave would smell of it for weeks.” He paused.
“She is not always a gentle woman. But when she cooked she was precise. Each of us had a dish that was ours. Something she made only for us, specific to us, that she’d worked out over time. ”
“What was yours?”
He looked at his mug. “Lamb in juniper broth. The way her mother made it. I asked her once what made it different and she said, time. That was it. She never rushed the reduction.” He felt the corner of his mouth move. “I spent six years trying to replicate it. I still haven’t.”
“Is that why you cook?”
He considered it properly. He owed her that. She’d been honest, after all. “Partly. Also because I’m better at it than my brothers and I enjoy their suffering.”
She laughed, and he joined her.
“Your poor mother. Thirteen sons.”
“She handled us just fine.”
There was a long pause where they sipped their cocoa and watched the waves lap against the rocks below, Mother Earth’s lullaby.
Elise leaned against him. Not suddenly. Gradually, the way warmth spread.
Her shoulder dropping against his arm first, and then the rest of her following with a kind of inevitability, her head tipping sideways until it found his shoulder and staying there.
He’d thought she was asleep then she spoke, in a drowsy tone.
“Did you ever hope to find your mate?”
He considered her words for a long moment. Before meeting her, he would have said no. But she exposed something inside of him, a loneliness he had not realized existed.
“I had never thought about it. Not really. I had my restaurant, the staff. I was busy.”
“But were you happy?”
Happy? What did that mean? He honestly didn’t know. “I was…content.”
“And now?”
Her words were almost slurred with sleep, her eyelids heavy, but she persisted.
How could he tell her that she was his mate when he lived in a cave and he suspected that she needed the sky?
He had noted her tension when she first arrived.
The descent from the employees’ entrance was daunting for most people, even those without a fear of being underground, and she had been pale, her heartbeat rapid, and her eyes shone with fear.
But he respected how she stuck with it, even when told she would sleep in staff quarters.
He suspected his mother had a hand in all of this, including her arrival, since he had not sought out the blog, and now she was trapped here. He would not keep her here.
If she accepted the bond, yes, he would be able to walk in sunlight, but he would not leave his restaurant. He was tied to the cave, to Iceland and his heritage. She was a bird who needed the freedom, to taste and experience the world. He would not trap her.
“Stenrik?” Her sleepy voice interrupted him.
He would not.
Her breathing grew even. The cocoa mug had tilted in her hands and he took it gently, set it on the windowsill without waking her.
Outside, the horizon had begun to shift. The deep blue going pale at the edges. Three hours. That was all he got.
He carried her back to her room. She stirred slightly when he lifted her, her brow furrowing, and then she made a sound that was not quite a word and turned her face into his shoulder and was gone again. The sweater was warm wool against his forearms.
He laid her down on the narrow staff-quarters bed, pulled the blanket up, and stood back.
The room was small. She'd left the lamp on low, the kind that came on automatically, and in its amber light he could see the few things she'd unpacked, the careful order she imposed on unfamiliar spaces, the stack of notebooks on the small shelf, the camera bag tucked against the wall, and a night light plugged into the wall.
He shifted the bag and sat down.
He would stay. Not forever. Just until he could be certain that if she woke disoriented in the small unfamiliar room, in the cave that pressed in around her, there would be a voice here she recognized. A presence that would not let the walls close in.
It was the only thing he could offer.