Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN WHICH GRYLA IS INSUFFERABLE AND RIGHT
T he cavern opened like a cathedral ceiling.
Stenrik stepped through the low arch first—not narrow enough to trouble her—and heard her quiet intake behind him as the space revealed itself.
She had gripped his hand through the passage to the springs, her breathing tight, but now, she dropped his hand and stepped fully into the space and her eyes were filled with awe.
He understood the reaction. He’d had it himself, once, the first time his father had brought him here as a boy. Some things earned their reaction.
The ceiling soared. Black basalt shot through with veins of pale mineral, arching thirty feet overhead, and the geothermal springs below caught the phosphorescent glow of the lichen colonizing the upper rock and threw it back in rippling patterns across every surface—blue-green and silver, shifting with the movement of the water.
The air was thick and warm and smelled of minerals and deep earth and something older than either.
Three separate pools, each a different temperature, fed by channels that had been running since before his grandfather’s grandfather drew breath.
Steam curled off the nearest one, slow and undisturbed.
Beautiful. It was objectively beautiful, and he’d stopped letting himself notice that a long time ago, the way you stopped noticing anything that was only ever yours.
He noticed it now, seeing it through her eyes tonight.
Then he saw the wine.
A bottle, two glasses, a wooden board of cheese and dried fruit arranged on the flat stone ledge beside the main pool. A small candle casting its entirely unnecessary light over the scene.
Stenrik’s jaw tightened.
“Mother,” he growled, low and very controlled, but the word still echoed off the walls.
A laugh echoed through the cavern, warm, and entirely too pleased with itself. It bounced off the basalt ceiling and disappeared.
Elise turned to look at him.
He kept his expression neutral. This required effort.
“My mother’s meddling,” he explained. “She has opinions about my social life.”
She looked at the wine. The candle. The cheese arranged with what he had to admit was a certain flair. “She set this up.”
“Yes.”
“Before you invited me.”
A beat. “She hoped.”
She turned to face him fully then, head tilting. “I’m sorry?”
He exhaled through his nose. This was going to require explanation and he had not expected this evening.
“The hot springs are mine. I use them privately. I mentioned them tonight because—” he stopped, recalibrated “—because you needed rest and I thought you would benefit. My mother anticipated the conversation. She does that.” He looked at the candle with feeling.
“She has been doing it for approximately five hundred years and has not yet been stopped.”
Elise was quiet for a moment. He couldn’t read her expression in the rippling mineral light.
“Do you regret bringing me?” she asked.
The mate bond flared.
It hit him in the chest like a hand pressed flat against his sternum—sudden, fierce, entirely disproportionate to the question. It had been getting stronger in such a short time. He pressed his fist against it, a reflex, and made himself breathe.
“No,” he said. Emphatically. More emphatically than he’d intended.
She relaxed, her shoulders easing and her brow unfurrowed. She looked at the hand he’d pressed to his chest, then back up at him, but she didn’t ask.
She reached for the tie of her robe instead, her eyes on the pool.
He turned toward the water.
He heard the soft slide of fabric then she stepped to the edge of the pool. He allowed himself one glance, the way a man allows himself exactly as much as he can bear, and then he understood why the mate bond had no interest in being reasonable about any of this.
The swimsuit was simple. Dark, conservative, nothing designed to be sexy. She was remarkable in it anyway—the line of her collarbone, the curve of her waist, her long legs as she tested the temperature of the water. He saw her assess the size of the space surrounding them.
He watched her find the ceiling. Watched her shoulders drop half an inch when she did.
Good, he thought. Good .
He stripped his shirt and stepped into the water from the far side.
The heat was exactly right, as it always was—geothermal and constant, the mountain’s own temperature. He settled on the stone seat that ran along the edge, the water reaching his chest, and watched Elise descend the steps cautiously.
Then she was in.
The sound she made was entirely involuntary. A low, drawn-out exhale that softened into something that was nearly a moan—relief, warmth and the pleasure of a body that had been holding tension so long it had forgotten the alternative. She let her head fall back, just briefly, eyes closing.
The mate bond surged the length of his body.
She did not do that on purpose. He was certain of it. She hadn’t even looked at him. She was simply in warm water after a long day in a cave with his entire family, and her body had expressed exactly what it felt about that, and she had no idea what that sound did to him.
He gripped the stone ledge underwater and said nothing.
After a moment she lifted her head and looked across the pool at him. He had positioned himself at the opposite edge. He intended to stay there.
“This is extraordinary,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You come here alone.”
“Usually.”
She considered that, the rippling light playing across her face. “Have you brought anyone else?”
“My brothers and their mates have used it occasionally, but no one else.”
She considered his words with a pleased half-smile on her face. She settled on the ledge across from him and closed her eyes, savoring the warmth. He slowly let the heat seep into the tense muscles, working out the tensions from his family. Then she spoke.
“The bond,” she said. “You felt it when you pressed your hand against your chest, didn’t you?”
He froze, then nodded. “Yes, I feel it in my chest.” And other places but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
She thought for a moment. “Does the other person feel it too—when it’s happening? The potential mate?”
He opened his eyes and focused on her, but she still rested her head against the stone, her head tilted to the ceiling.“Why do you ask?”
She looked at the water. Her fingers trailed across the surface, thoughtful.
“Because I’ve been feeling something. Since I got here.
Around you.” A pause. “I didn’t know what to call it at first. I thought it was the cave—anxiety presenting as something else, like it sometimes does.
But it’s not the same feeling.” Her eyes came back to his.
“It started as warmth. Here.” She touched her sternum, the same place he’d pressed his fist. “The first time you talked me through the baking chamber. And it’s gotten stronger.
Every time I’m close to you it shifts. Like a current.
” She stopped, studying his face in the mineral light, reading him the way she read everything.
“It was stronger tonight. In the kitchen. When you handed me the spoon.”
She felt it. He’d suspected but hadn’t let himself hope.
The mate bond was not being subtle about its opinions. He could feel it pressing against the inside of his ribs like something that had been patient long enough and was now done with patience.
“It’s gotten stronger every day,” she said, quieter.
“And I don’t think it’s just the situation.
I don’t think it’s just being in a cave with someone I find interesting or admire or—” she stopped.
Started again. More careful, more deliberate, because she was always deliberate when it mattered.
“I think I have feelings for you. Which I’m aware is a very fast thing to say to someone I’ve known for a few days.
Barely.” She didn’t look away. “But I don’t think it’s fast. I think it’s been accumulating since the first day and I’d rather say it clearly than manage it politely. ”
The marks began to surface.
He knew them by the heat—the old runes that lay dormant in his skin, the ones that had no meaning for unmatched trolls, stirring and rising to the surface in pale lines of silver-gold.
They moved up his forearms first, then his shoulders, the base of his throat.
His brothers’ marks had done the same, in their time.
He’d watched it happen to Gunnar across a kitchen table and thought, distantly, that it looked painful.
It wasn’t painful. It was the opposite of pain. That was, in some ways, worse.
He braced his hands on the ledge.
Elise’s eyes had dropped to his arm. She pushed slowly through the water toward him, and he did not move away because every coherent argument for moving away had temporarily evacuated his mind.
She stopped an arm’s length from him. Reached out.
Her fingers found the inside of his forearm just below the surface of the water, where a rune curved toward his wrist in a line he’d never seen on himself before.
She traced it.
The sensation moved through him like sound through stone—complete, structural, everywhere at once. His breath left him. The bond detonated in his chest, throwing heat down every nerve, and his grip on the ledge became the only thing between him and catastrophically poor judgment.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended .
She looked up at him from under her lashes, her fingers still on his arm, her touch light and absolutely devastating.
“Maybe I do,” she said.
S tenrik should have left the water the moment she touched the rune on his arm.
Instead, he sat frozen in the geothermal pool while Elise’s fingertips traced the glowing line beneath the surface, her expression intent and fascinated, like she was studying some rare phenomenon she couldn’t quite explain.
The problem was that he could explain it.
Mate .
The word echoed through him with terrifying certainty.