Chapter 9 #2
Torfi subsided, still grinning, and reached for more salmon.
Elise picked up her coffee, looked at Stenrik across the kitchen, and said nothing. She didn’t need to. The bond hummed between them, warm and unhurried. He was still looking at her with a mix of emotions—terrified, relieved, and heated.
She realized Stenrik spoke most clearly when he said nothing at all.
She realized she was learning his language.
E veryone slowly drifted out..
Ketill first, Lily draped over his shoulder like a small boneless person, her shoes already off.
Amanda followed, collecting coffee mugs with one arm while promising to send wool supplier links because her sweater situation was, apparently, still a concern.
Gunnar and Wren disappeared after Torfi accused them of making prolonged eye contact in a deeply married manner.
Gunnar did not dignify it with a response and Wren laughed into her sketchbook.
Kevin hugged Stenrik around the middle on his way out and extracted a promise about bread tomorrow.
Torfi left last, singing something in Icelandic that Elise suspected was deeply inappropriate based on the cadence alone.
Then it was quiet.
Just the two of them and the low, steady breath of the geothermal vents and the heavy silence that was waiting for something.
Stenrik stood at the long prep counter. Wiping it down.
He’d been wiping the same section for ninety seconds.
Elise looked at the already-spotless surface, looked at him, and picked up her coffee mug. Carried it to the industrial sink and washed it, because she needed something to do with her hands.
“You don’t need to do that,” he said.
“I know.”
She dried the mug and set it aside before turning.
He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and the runes on his forearms still faintly glowing.
The bond hummed steadily beneath her ribs the moment their eyes met, warm and unhurried.
She pressed her fingers against her sternum briefly.
The bond pulsed once in response, smug as a cat.
I know , she thought at it. I’m aware .
She crossed to the wide windows overlooking the ocean.
Morning fog lay against the black cliffs, hiding the sun, and the Atlantic stretched out to the horizon gray and enormous and indifferent.
She’d grown up adjacent to water — ports and harbors glimpsed from the windows of various places that were never quite home.
She’d learned not to get attached to any particular view.
She was very attached to this one.
Behind her, Stenrik followed, staying shy of the windows even though the sun was weak.
“Elise.”
She looked back.
He looked conflicted about what he was about to say. “The bond,” he said. “What you’re feeling. It intensifies quickly at the beginning. Especially after—” a slight pause, because even Stenrik, apparently, wasn’t sure how to define the previous evening, “—physical intimacy.”
The memory of his hands on her waist sent tiny zings of electricity through her body. Excellent timing.
“Is that what the glowing was?”
His mouth shifted. Almost. “Partly.”
“Partly?”
He took off his apron and folded it carefully. “It settles eventually.”
“And if it doesn’t settle?”
“Then the mating bond is not complete.”
Mating. Not dating. Not whatever this is. Not something she could file under a one-night stand in Iceland, personal, brief and complicated.
Something that now felt, inconveniently, exactly right.
She turned back to the ocean.
“I’m scheduled to leave tomorrow.”
The silence behind her felt heavy, weighted.
She felt it before she heard it—the slight shift in the air, something pulled inward. She waited for him to argue. Push back. Say something that would give her something to push against, give them something to discuss.
“Yes,” he said.
Nothing else.
Damn him.
She stared at the Atlantic. New York was waiting—her apartment, her producer, her editing queue, the network deal she’d been carefully cultivating for eight months.
Lisbon. Argentina. Copenhagen. Her life organized into spreadsheets and departure gates, each destination a self-contained world she could enter fully and leave cleanly, nothing trailing after her.
She’d built it that way deliberately.
Her parents had been excellent teachers, if unintentional ones.
Her mother with her cruise itineraries. Her father with his seasonal promises.
Love, in her family, had always been postcard-shaped—vivid and brief and arriving after the fact.
She’d learned early that the horizon mattered more than the return.
She’d learned to stop waiting at the window.
She had never stopped being the child who waited at the window.
The bond tightened under her sternum, sudden and sharp, and she exhaled carefully through it.
Because the terrifying part wasn’t leaving.
She knew how to leave. She was excellent at leaving.
The terrifying part was what she kept imagining instead—slow mornings in this kitchen.
Coffee in the cave before the family descended.
Helping Kevin with his bread experiments while Torfi provided unhelpful commentary.
Hot springs after late service. Stenrik’s rough hands brushing flour from her cheek while the mountain breathed steadily around them.
Home .
The word pressed on her chest like a boulder.
Not a hotel. Not a sublet. Not a base between assignments.
Home.
She’d spent thirty-one years moving through other people’s homes, reviewing other people’s kitchens, writing beautifully about places she never stayed. She’d gotten very good at appreciating without belonging.
Stenrik had adjusted his life for her.
She heard him move. Not toward her—he never crowded, never pushed, it was one of the most disorienting things about him—just closer. The warmth of him settled at her back.
His hand came to rest on her shoulder. Light.
“You’re thinking too loudly,” he said.
A laugh escaped her before she could catch it. “That’s concerning. I haven’t said anything.”
“The bond helps.”
She turned.
He was close enough that she could see the exhaustion in his eyes. The restraint wound through every line of him, visible now that she knew where to look. Not distant. Not cold. Holding himself back with both hands because he thought she needed the space.
For her.
He was doing this for her.
Something inside her chest gave way completely.
“You already think I’m leaving,” she said.
His expression didn’t change.
But she felt his answer through the bond before he said it—a low, certain pulse. Not bitterness. Not accusation. Just the quiet certainty of a man who had made peace with a thing that hadn’t happened yet.
“Yes,” he said .
“Stenrik—”
“I know who you are.” His voice was steady, careful, the same voice he used to talk her through narrow tunnels. “You built a life moving. Seeing everything. You’re good at it.” His hand slid from her shoulder slowly, as if it cost him. “I would never ask you to change for me.”
The cave pressed warmly around her.
She thought about changing. She thought about all the ways she’d already changed for others—for schools that didn’t want to deal with a child’s grief, for a career that rewarded lightness over weight, for a life structured around never needing anyone badly enough to be left behind.
She thought about the fact that Stenrik had just offered her the most generous thing anyone had ever said to her, and he thought it was a kindness.
It wasn’t a kindness.
It was him deciding for her again.
“What if I don’t want to change?” she said. “What if I want—” she stopped, found the word “—more?”
He went still. Not the careful stillness. The kind that meant she’d gotten through.
She stepped closer, tipped her chin up, and held his gaze. “You don’t get to preemptively grieve me, Stenrik. I’m still here.”
The rune over his heart began to glow. Faint. Steady.
He looked at her for a long moment with everything he never said written plainly across his face, and she waited. Then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear carefully.
“You’re still here,” he said quietly.
“I’m still here,” she said.
The ocean moved outside the window, gray and vast and going nowhere. But the clock was ticking.