Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
TABLE FOR SEVEN
T he soup arrived in silence, which lasted exactly as long as it took Torfi to pick up his spoon.
“I remember the first time Stenrik made kjotsúpa,” he announced to the table at large. “He was fourteen. He’d decided it lacked complexity, so he added dried seaweed, juniper ash, and—” he paused for effect “—a splash of brennivín.”
“It was an experiment,” Stenrik said without looking up from his bowl.
“Mother cried.”
“She was proud.”
“She was horrified.” Torfi turned to Elise with the satisfied look of a man who had been saving this story. “It tasted like the sea had an argument with a funeral pyre.”
Gunnar made a quiet sound from the far end of the table that might have been a laugh. Wren, small, dark-haired, with paint staining her forearm that she hadn’t quite managed to scrub off, pressed her lips together and looked at her bowl.
“The bread is good,” Ketill said. He was the largest of them by a considerable margin, broad through the shoulder in a way that made the cave’s stone walls seem proportionate for once.
He said it the way a man says something he means completely and has no intention of elaborating on.
His wife, Amanda, reached over and patted his hand without looking up from refilling her water glass.
“It’s excellent,” she said, and she meant it too, but where Ketill’s compliments arrived like boulders, hers had an easy warmth that made the table feel less formal. “Kevin has been obsessed with bread lately. He’s convinced he can make it at home. Last week he tried to bake it in the garden.”
“Did it work?” Wren asked.
“He claims it’s ‘geothermally adjacent.’” Amanda’s expression was a combination of exasperated and charmed. “He’s eight. He got it from a YouTube video. Lily now calls everything in the kitchen ‘science.’”
“She’s five,” Ketill said, with an affectionate tone.
“Five and already running experiments,” Amanda said. “She mixed skyr and hot sauce last Tuesday. For science.”
“Was it good?” Torfi asked.
“It was not.”
“Did she eat it anyway?”
“Every bite.”
Torfi pointed across the table at no one in particular. “That’s the troll blood.”
“She’s fully human,” Amanda said.
“She has the instincts.”
Ketill said, very calmly, “Torfi.”
Torfi subsided. Marginally.
Elise reached for the bread, smothering a smile.
The conversation at the table was comfortable—the overlap of voices, the shorthand, the way Amanda leaned slightly into Ketill’s arm without either of them appearing to notice, the way Gunnar’s hand found Wren’s wrist when she laughed too hard and nearly knocked her water glass.
Small adjustments. Counterweights. A family that had learned its own rhythm.
She was watching it the way she watched kitchens. The way she watched everything, really—one step removed, cataloguing, appreciating without quite being inside it.
She was good at that.
Stenrik sat at the head of the table and said almost nothing.
He’d served the char himself, placed each plate without comment, and was now eating, listening to everything yet contributing to none of it.
Elise had watched him cook for two days.
She knew what his concentration looked like. This wasn’t that.
This was something softer. He was watching his brothers the way she was watching the table—but it wasn’t distance. It was more like a man who loved something and refused to say so. Or didn’t know how.
“Tell her about the restaurant critic,” Torfi said, looking at Stenrik. “The one from Copenhagen.”
“No.”
“He sent back the fermented shark,” Torfi told Elise. “Which, fine, fair enough, it’s an acquired taste. But then he reviewed it. Called it—what was it?”
“An exercise in culinary self-indulgence,” Stenrik said flatly.
“And Stenrik wrote a four-hundred-word rebuttal on the restaurant’s website.”
“It was a response.”
“It had footnotes.”
Gunnar looked up from his bowl. He had been quiet all evening but there was a faint quirk at the corner of his mouth. “It had citations,” he said .
“He cited himself,” Torfi said. “From his own blog. Which he maintains nobody reads.”
“People read it.”
“Four people, Stenrik. One of them is Mother.”
Elise looked at Stenrik. He was looking at his spoon with a long-suffering expression of a man who was reconsidering every choice that had led to this dinner.
“I thought it was thorough,” she said.
The table went briefly quiet. Stenrik looked at her.
“You read it?” he said.
“I research every kitchen I visit.” She kept her voice neutral. “You had a point about the fermentation process. The critic didn’t understand what he was tasting.”
A flicker of something in his eyes. Just briefly. Then he looked back at his bowl.
Torfi stared at her with the open delight of someone witnessing a rare natural phenomenon. Elise reached for more bread.
“My grandmother was the cook in our family,” she said, mostly to fill the silence.
All attention at the table was focused on her, and it was easier to keep talking than squirm under the attention.
“She loved Julia Child and loved to experiment. Sunday dinners were a tradition. All kinds of food, but especially comfort food. Pot roast, roast chicken, anything that would make you feel like family. She’d plan the whole week for sunday.
And every night there was a home cooked meal and fresh bread. ”
“Where was this?” Wren asked.
“Massachusetts, outside of Boston. She stayed there her whole life. Same apartment, same market on Saturdays, same pot she’d had since her wedding.
” Elise broke off a piece of bread. “She died when I was twelve. After that, it was really just my parents and me, and they weren’t—” she paused, chose the right word “—domestic, exactly. ”
“What did they do?” Amanda asked. She was genuinely interested, not asking to be polite.
“They traveled. They still do, actually. They’re on a cruise ship right now, a hobby or lifestyle.
They go from cruise ship to cruise ship, checking out different destinations.
Sometimes they take separate ships to the same port.
Keeps things interesting. Home base is in New York City.
We share an apartment, because none of us are there for long.
” She smiled because it was genuinely funny, from the outside.
“Despite being free spirits, they have an itinerary. They email it to me at the start of every season. They want to make sure we all know where everyone is.”
Torfi’s spoon paused midway to his mouth. “They’re on separate ships?”
“They find the same destinations more interesting when they arrive independently. They share their experiences and compare their findings.” She could feel Stenrik looking at her.
“They’d put me in boarding school during the year so they could travel without worrying.
It was a good school. Several of them were. They wanted to give me some stability.”
“So you grew up traveling,” Amanda said.
“I grew up adjacent to it. I got the postcards.” She said it lightly, the way she’d learned to hide the hurt.
The postcards from Lisbon and Cape Town and Kyoto, always addressed in her mother’s looping hand, always ending with miss you, be good, more soon .
“I suppose that’s why I ended up doing what I do.
Kitchens were the first places that felt—consistent.
You go somewhere new, the ingredients are different, the techniques are different, but the logic is the same. It made sense.”
The table was quieter than it had been. She hadn’t meant to say that much.
She reached for her wine .
Stenrik, who had not spoken much all evening, said, “You build the home in your work.”
She looked at him. His face was as still as the cave walls, but there was nothing blank in it.
“Yes,” she said. “Something like that.”
Torfi, who saw way more than he let on, chose exactly that moment to announce that he’d once tried to recreate their grandmother’s black bread using lava stone and it had turned into something that functioned better as a doorstop than a food item, and the tension eased.
Under cover of the laughter, Elise glanced toward the head of the table.
Stenrik was looking at her. Not the assessing look she’d gotten in the kitchen, the one that catalogued whether she could hold a knife properly and be trusted near his prep stations. Something else. Something that took the measure of different things.
He looked away first.
She finished her soup. It was, she thought, the best thing she’d eaten in months. She didn’t say so. She didn’t need to. She suspected he already knew.
T he ocean was extraordinary here in Iceland.
Elise had noticed it the first night. The way the water caught the long Icelandic evening and held it, bruised silver and pale gold bleeding together at the horizon line.
Underground, you forgot there was a surface.
You forgot there was a sky. Then you came to these windows, and it hit you all over again, the sheer beauty of the world outside, enormous and beautiful.
She’d tucked herself into the window seat with her knees drawn up and her notebook open on the bench next to her, though she hadn’t written anything in it for twenty minutes.
The pen rested against the page. It felt wrong to document anything from the evening, even the food.
It was personal, his family. It should stay that way.
The window was cracked open and the night air was cool on her skin.
She was becoming accustomed to his presence and almost expected to see him late at night.
It had only been a couple of nights but she was beginning to feel like this was a ritual for them, their own private time.
She enjoyed it and would miss it when she left.
While she didn’t enjoy the underground, she was becoming adjusted to it, especially with Stenrik’s help.
And, for the first time in a long time, she felt like she was home.
It was an odd feeling. She was accustomed to moving every few weeks or so.
She spent a week or two at every location, then head for New York to put together the content for her show.
She worked with her producer and editor to cut the video and write the content, then add her commentary to pull it all together.
Then, she was on the road again. Her apartment was no more than a way station, a place to do laundry and briefly pause to prepare for the next project.
It was exhausting. The only place that had felt like home was her grandmother’s country farmhouse, where she spent so many of her younger years. After that, she never knew where her holidays would be spent, only that it would be a hotel.
Coming to Iceland, despite the cave atmosphere, she had felt something settle in her chest, like there was something familiar here, even though she had never been there before.
And meeting Stenrik had been a recognition she had never felt with anyone else before.
When he described the mating bond, she could feel it viscerally, deep in her chest, as if it pulled towards him, connecting them.
Normally, it would disturb her, but somehow it felt right .
Maybe that’s how she knew he was standing beside her.
He stood a few feet away from the window, and she glanced up. He’d changed out of the kitchen clothes into something darker, simpler, and his hair was loose from the bun he wore in the kitchen. He looked at the ocean the way she did—like he’d seen it a thousand times and still found it fascinating.
“You’re still up,” he said.
“So are you.”
He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head and said nothing else for a moment. Then he sat, not crowding her, just settling into the other end of the window seat.
“Tonight was good,” she said. “Your family. Thank you for including me. You didn’t have to.”
He looked at her sidelong. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. They liked you.”
“I liked them, too.” She kept her voice easy. “Even Torfi.”
He chuckled. “That’s a true accomplishment.”
They watched the waves crash against the jagged rocks below, white foam exploding into the dark water in a rhythm that should have been calming.
The salt air from the cracked window curled around them, cool against Elise’s heated skin, but Stenrik’s scent—wood smoke, spice, and something distinctly male—wrapped around her like a slow seduction.
Every inhale dragged her deeper under. Desire simmered low in her belly, tightening with each brush of his shoulder against hers, each rough exhale that rumbled from his chest. She kept her eyes fixed on the ocean, pretending the ache between her thighs had nothing to do with the troll sitting far too close beside her.
“Are you having trouble sleeping?” he asked. “Underground.”
She considered the honest answer. “It helped having you there last night.” She tilted her head back against the stone. “ I’ll be better tonight I think. I know the layout. I know the sounds.” A beat. “I’m not tired yet.”
He nodded. She watched him weigh something, his jaw shifting slightly the way it did when he was deciding whether to say a thing or not.
“I was going to the hot springs,” he said finally. “Deeper in the mountain. I use them after long shifts. Or when I—” a brief pause “—need to settle.”
She went still. Not from fear. The opposite.
“There won’t be anyone else there,” he added. “They’re private. Not part of the restaurant.” He was looking at the ocean, not at her. “The cavern is large. You would have room.”
The hot springs in Reykjavik had been on her list. She’d looked them up before the trip, read the descriptions, planned the afternoon.
Then she’d stood at the edge of the Blue Lagoon looking at the bodies packed in steam and the low mineral-scented air pressing from all sides, and her chest had tightened before she’d even stepped in.
She’d made an excuse. She’d filed it under next time and not thought about it again.
“I wanted to try the ones in the city,” she said. “But there were too many people. I couldn’t—” she paused, editing herself out of habit, then stopped. “I felt uncomfortable.”
He nodded once, like that was all the explanation required.
“These are private,” he said again. “And quiet.” A slight pause. “The ceiling is high.”
Something melted inside of her. He’d thought about it. He’d thought about the ceiling specifically, thought about what she’d need, thought about it before he even crossed the room to ask. She uncurled her legs from beneath her and set the notebook aside.
“I know I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be with you. ”
He stared at her with an unreadable expression but there was something in his eyes, something vulnerable for just one moment.
“I’ll need to grab a swimsuit.”
He stood. “I’ll wait.”
She went to get her swimsuit.