Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
FAMILY … CAN’T LIVE WITH THEM, CAN’T GET RID OF THEM
T he kitchen was his sanctuary and he desperately needed this peace after his time in the caves.
The familiar smell of salt and rendered fat settled something ragged in his chest, the mating bond was demanding that he go to Elise and comfort her, and more, but he resisted. Instead, he went to the kitchen to prepare for the evening.
He needed this.
He didn’t need to think about the cave, or the way she’d pressed her back against the wall while he talked to keep her breathing even, and the way her skin felt in his hands, the softness of her hands, and her scent that still teased his senses.
He pulled a pan from the rack. A task. He needed a task.
Snúeur, a large cinnamon roll type of dessert. Elise would like that.
Torfi was sitting on one of the prep station.
Legs swinging.
Grinning like a man with absolutely nothing to lose, which, in Stenrik’s considerable experience, meant his brother was about to cost him something.
“Off,” Stenrik said, and shoved him before Torfi could argue.
Torfi hit the floor with the grace of someone who’d been shoved off prep stations before and had made peace with it. “There’s no service tonight,” he said cheerfully, dusting himself off. “Plenty of time to clean them.”
Stenrik frowned. Did a fast calculation. Then swore. A single word, short and creative, in Icelandic.
“Dinner is cancelled.”
“Not happening.” Torfi hopped back up onto a different surface—the island, the absolute audacity—and pointed a finger at him. “Everyone wants a look at your new blogger.”
“She is not my blogger.” He yanked open the cold storage. “And the invitation is withdrawn.”
“It’s not everyone. Just Ketill and Amanda, Gunnar and Wren.” A pause. “And me, obviously. Mom may or may not show. You know how she is.”
Stenrik turned slowly. “You told her.”
“She already knew.”
“Torfi.”
“She already knows everything. I was being transparent.”
He reached for his brother. Torfi ducked out of range with the reflexes of someone who had spent centuries getting on people’s nerves and surviving it.
“I can stay and help,” Torfi offered from behind the island, “or I can leave you to brood in peace. Your choice, Chef Bro-licious.”
Stenrik stared at him.
Torfi grinned, pointed at him with both hands, and darted out of the kitchen.
“Seven o’clock!” floated back from the corridor.
Stenrik stood in the silence of his kitchen. The pan was still in his hand. The geothermal vents breathed their slow, steady heat up through the floor.
He set the pan down.
She is not my blogger .
He picked it back up.
Fine. Seven o’clock.
E lise remained in her room for a few hours.
Stenrik resisted the urge to check on her multiple times, not wanting to overwhelm her.
At one point, he knocked on her door and left a tray for her with lunch.
The tray was clean forty-five minutes later, so he assumed she enjoyed it.
He’d left a note that there was no service that night, but a family dinner.
She was invited and he was half hoping she would decline.
At five, she showed up in the kitchen.
He hadn’t expected that. He’d told her seven—family dinner, not service—and he’d half expected her to not show, or to appear with that careful professional composure assembled around her like armor, notebook in hand.
Instead, she walked into the kitchen at five in a soft grey sweater with her hair loose, and she asked, “What do you need me to do?”
He almost dropped the turnips.
“Can you dice?” he asked.
“Mostly,” she said.
Fine. He handed her a knife. “Don’t worry about being perfect. Just cut them in one inch squares.”
He put her on the root vegetables—turnips, carrots, waxy potatoes—while he dealt with the lamb.
A family dinner meant kjotsúpa. It was not negotiable.
His mother would appear if she felt like it; his brothers would descend like a minor catastrophe, and there was exactly one dish that had always meant sit down, you’re home in this family, and it was the soup.
Everything else could be elegant. The soup was just the soup — lamb and root vegetables in clear broth, lava salt, thyme from the surface his staff brought down twice a week, and time. Mostly time.
He browned the lamb in fat that spat and hissed against the stone pan, and he was aware of her at the prep block behind him the way he was always aware of temperature changes in his kitchen. Peripheral. Constant.
The sound of her knife was good. Steady. No hesitation.
He didn’t turn to check. He didn’t need to. And that disturbed him. He always checked.
He pulled the lamb, deglazed with water and a splash of something sharp, and started laying the bones for broth.
The cave kitchen breathed around them—the low hiss of the geothermal vents, the particular dense warmth that never fully left the stone walls, the smell of fat and thyme building into something that was, if he was honest, the closest thing to comfort this place had ever produced.
“These done?” she asked.
He turned. The dice wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t a sous-chef and he could live with it, though he staff would argue the point.
“Yes,” he said.
She slid them into the bowl he pointed at and moved without being asked to the leeks.
She rinsed them herself, trimmed the dark green ends he’d have discarded anyway, and began slicing into clean white rounds.
She’d been in enough kitchens as an observer to know the basics.
But watching and doing were two different things.
She handled herself reasonably well and he was pleased.
He went back to the broth.
The bread he’d started that morning was well into its slow bake in the lower geothermal chamber, rúgbraue that would be dense and slightly sweet and served with smoked butter.
For the brothers he’d do a skyr dip, something to put on the table immediately so they stopped touching things.
He had a cold cured char he’d do as a starter—thin slices, sea buckthorn, sorrel—something bright before the weight of the soup.
“Herb stems or just the leaves?” she said, holding up the thyme.
“Stems in the pot now. Leaves for finishing.”
She separated them without comment, efficient, and crossed the kitchen to hand him the stems. His kitchen.
His organized disaster of stone shelves and hanging copper and dried herb bundles that swayed slightly in the vent draft.
She moved through it as if she belonged.
Adjusting quietly to his space rather than imposing on it.
He took the stems. Her fingers were cold from the leek water. His hand was warm from the pan.
She didn’t move away immediately. Just a half second longer than the exchange required.
Then she went back to the counter.
He added the thyme to the pot.
“Gunnar and Wren,” he said, mostly to say something. “They’ll eat whatever’s in front of them. Ketill and Amanda—Amanda has opinions about salt.”
“More or less?”
“Less. Which is wrong, but that’s her opinion.”
Elise made a small sound that was almost amusement. “And Torfi?”
“Torfi will eat the garnish off other people’s plates and call it not being wasteful.” He kept his voice flat. “Ignore anything he says.”
“About the food?”
“About anything. ”
She did laugh at that, short, genuine, not the polished one she deployed for content. He kept his eyes on the pot.
The soup came together the way good things did, without drama.
He skimmed the broth, added the vegetables in the right order—roots first, then the leeks later so they didn’t go to nothing—and tasted.
Salt. A small adjustment. He handed the spoon across to her without thinking about it, the way he’d do with any staff he trusted, and she tasted and nodded and said, “Half a minute more.”
He’d already been thinking half a minute more. She may not be a perfect sous-chef but she had excellent taste buds.
He didn’t say so.
She was plating the char when he came around to retrieve the dill oil from the shelf above the cold station, and the kitchen was narrow there—designed that way, deliberately, because he’d built it for one chef and one sous and a pass, not for two people who were both too aware of each other.
He reached past her shoulder for the bottle.
Her back was to him and she didn’t startle, just tipped her chin up slightly as he came close, and he caught the scent of whatever she’d put in her hair—something clean, faint, nothing like the cave—and made himself focus on the shelf.
He retrieved the oil and stepped back.
“Good,” he said, about the char. Because it was.
She glanced up. Just for a second. A hint of a smile.
Then she turned back to the plate and finished the garnish.
The bread came up from the lower chamber twenty minutes later, dense and dark and smelling of molasses and earth, and he sliced it at the board while she set the table and the kitchen had settled into a comfortable silence.
Two people who knew what they were doing and had stopped, somewhere in the last hour, getting in each other’s way.
He heard the tunnel door at the far end open. His brothers’ voices, plural and overlapping, bouncing off the rock. Torfi already saying something that would require Stenrik to intervene within the first three minutes of dinner.
He looked across the kitchen at Elise.
She met his eyes, picked up the bread basket, and said, “Should I be worried?”
“Always,” he said, and picked up the soup.