Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE PROBLEM WITH LOVING SOMEONE BUILT FOR OPEN SKIES
H e noticed halfway through second seating.
Elise forgot to film the langoustine plating.
She never missed shots. Not once since she’d been there—not the herb oil trailing across stone, not the steam lifting off volcanic rock, not the half-second of chaos before a plate achieved silence and became art.
She’d developed an instinct for his kitchen that had unsettled him from the first day, the way she knew where to stand without being told, what to capture without asking.
She saw his work the way he saw it. He’d stopped being surprised by that and started being grateful, and then that had become something much worse.
Tonight she was somewhere else entirely. Half a step behind everything, missing shots, filming the wrong elements. Present in body, absent in everything else.
The bond carried it under his skin all evening. A low, building ache he couldn’t name, was afraid to identify. He plated twelve portions of smoked lamb and told himself it was fine. He told himself that until it wasn’t.
By the end of service his jaw ached from clenching it.
Staff cleaned out faster than usual, reading the room with the self-preservation instincts of people who had worked for him long enough to know the difference between his normal controlled displeasure and whatever this was.
Sigrid paused at the tunnel entry, coat half-on, and looked at him in the experience of someone who had been with him since the beginning.
“Don’t let your brothers advise you.”
“Noted.”
Torfi appeared from nowhere, which he always did. “Counterpoint?—”
“Leave.” Stenrik pointed at the tunnel.
“Such hostility.” He went. Sullenly, and with an expression of profound personal injury, but he went.
The restaurant emptied. The geothermal lanterns crackled low. The ocean moved beneath the cliffs, restless and enormous and completely indifferent to the fact that Stenrik was standing in his own kitchen watching his life quietly come apart.
She was at the western windows. The dark Atlantic beyond the glass, and her face turned toward it, and the bond pulling at his chest like a hook through muscle.
He’d known this was coming.
He’d known. From the first morning she’d turned up in his kitchen at five fifty-three with her hair loose and her hands ready, he’d known how it ended.
She was light, illuminating everything she touched and keeping nothing.
Her whole life had been designed for departure.
He’d watched her build the exit even as she unpacked.
And still.
Idiot. He reached for the aquavit and poured two glasses, because his hands needed something to do.
The bond had settled in his chest last night.
He’d felt it happen—the difference between the bright, urgent pull of the early days and this new thing, deeper and quieter, woven through him like a root finding stone.
He hadn’t said so. He’d been going to. He’d rehearsed three separate versions of the conversation and found something wrong with all of them and now here they were, two days before her flight, and the words were still sitting unsaid in his ribcage like a fist.
The other thing sat there too.
The thing he’d told no one outside his family.
The bond broke his curse, allowed him to walk in sunlight, like his brothers Gunnar and Ketill.
A mated bond fully sealed meant the sun no longer had claim on him.
He could walk outside. He could see daylight.
He could be done with five hundred years of watching summer arrive and feeling the world shrink down to stone and lanternlight and the width of a tunnel.
He’d had that. Last night, when the runes blazed and the mountain hummed, he’d had it within reach.
And he hadn’t told her.
Because telling her meant asking something of her, and he’d rather lose the cure than make her feel obligated to provide it.
Losing her meant losing the sun. But it also meant he’d never break the curse.
He’d be doomed to eternal night. But he would never put that burden on her.
He also would never walk into the sunlight and turn to stone like his brothers almost did. He wasn’t that dramatic. Yet.
He carried the glasses to the windows and sat beside her. She looked up, and her smile arrived a half-second late. That small delay hit him harder than anything else had all evening.
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
The aquavit sat untouched in her hands. Outside, moonlight lay flat across the water.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “Whatever happened today. You don’t owe me that.”
She stared at the glass, shoulders slumped, avoiding his gaze .
“My producer called this morning.” She turned the glass between her palms. “Network syndication. A great offer—international distribution, new seasons, full production backing.” A pause. “It’s everything I’ve been working toward.”
There it was.
He kept his gaze on the ocean, trying to ignore the pain in his chest. He should have learned by now to stop wanting something he could never have.
“You should take it,” he said.
Silence.
Then, very softly, “That was fast.”
He should have said congratulations. He should have asked about the terms, the timeline, whether she’d need help filming the final cave segments before she left. He should have said something useful and impersonal and given them both something to stand on.
Instead he thought about the runes on his forearm that had gone dark last night and hadn’t fully faded since.
He thought about the sound she made in the springs and the way she’d fit against him like she belonged there.
He thought about her coming down the tunnel toward him every morning, eyes adjusting to the dark, never once asking to leave.
He thought, stay .
He considered dropping to his knees and begging her. He did not.
“You built something amazing,” he said instead, and it came out rougher than intended. He cleared his throat. “The world should see it.”
“Stenrik—”
“The distribution is right. The timing is right.” Each word measured, costing him everything. “You’ve earned this.”
She was looking at him in a way that made the back of his throat ache.
“And you?” she said. “What do you get? ”
The mountain. He’d said that to himself a hundred times in the past few days, like a man repeating an answer he didn’t believe.
I have the mountain. I have the cave. I have five hundred years of doing exactly this, and the next five hundred will be the same.
That was fine before you walked down the tunnel, and it will be fine again.
It didn’t sound fine.
It sounded like a prison sentence.
“I have the restaurant,” he said. “I have my work.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He stood before he meant to, before he couldn’t speak, before four days of want overruled the last of his restraint. He turned away from her and pressed one fist to the window frame and stared at the ocean and breathed.
“Elise.” His voice came out stripped of everything he’d been carefully keeping out of it. “I am genuinely glad for you.” He stopped. Started again. “I wish you all the success.”
The bond pulled hard, a long desperate ache that ran from his sternum to his spine.
He walked away from the window.
He walked away from her.
He made it to the kitchen archway before she said his name—quiet, just once—and he stopped. Stood with one hand against the warm basalt and his back to her. Every rune on his body burned silently under his sleeves, where she couldn’t see.
Tell her . The thought arrived with merciless clarity. Tell her what the bond means. Tell her about the curse. Give her the information and let her choose.
He almost turned around.
Then he thought of her face when she talked about her parents. The postcards. The boarding school windows. A woman who had spent her whole life being the thing other people left behind, who had built a career out of never needing anyone badly enough to feel the leaving.
He would not be the one who trapped her.
Not even to walk in daylight.
Not even for this.
He pushed through the archway without turning back, and the stone closed around him, and the geothermal dark swallowed him whole the way it always had, the way it always would, and that was fine.
It was fine.
The rune over his heart blazed once, furious and grieving, and went dark.