Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE MOUNTAIN APPARENTLY HAD OPINIONS
E lise packed badly when she was upset.
Usually she was ruthless about it—compression cubes, charger coiled, clothes folded flat. Years of airports had trained efficiency into her the way kitchens trained knife skills. Muscle memory. No thought required.
This morning she shoved a sweater in sideways and left it there. Her spreadsheet and checklist had disappeared and she was too distracted to look for it.
The room looked exactly as it always had. Camera gear by the desk. Production notes fanned across the bed. The small window set high in the stone wall letting in a strip of grey Icelandic morning that illuminated absolutely nothing warmly.
Stenrik’s dark wool sweater hung over the chair where she’d draped it three nights ago.
She looked at it for two seconds and then looked away.
He hadn’t knocked. Hadn’t left anything. The bond—that warm, insistent pressure she’d stopped trying to rationalize—was still there under her ribs, pointing her deeper into the mountain the way a compass finds north. She ignored it, the way she ignored things when necessary.
He told you to take the job . She pressed the suitcase flat and yanked the zipper.
What she’d wanted was for him to ask her to stay. She hadn’t known that until he didn’t.
The sweater watched her from the chair. She picked it up and folded it neatly and set it on the desk and that was fine, that was very normal behavior, she was completely fine.
The ache in her chest disagreed.
She grabbed the stationery card from the desk because she couldn’t leave without saying something. Since he’d apparently retreated to the other side of the mountain to avoid her, she would have to write it out. She wrote fast, before she could think about it.
Stenrik, I think you’re being an idiot. Which is unfortunate because I’m apparently in love with you.
— Elise
PS: Also your family is terrifying.
T hat felt honest enough.
She left it with his sweater on his office desk beside the prep schedules and hauled her suitcase toward the employee tunnel.
The mountain felt wrong this morning.
She noticed it vaguely at first. The geothermal hum was somehow lower and stranger than usual.
She put it down to her own grief masquerading as atmospheric disturbance.
She was a woman in her thirties who was leaving a man she’d known for five days, a man she may have spent her whole life looking for, but she would never assume the mountain reacted to her feelings.
The employee tunnel let out near the lower cliff path. She knew this. She had walked it twice.
She walked it now and came out somewhere else entirely.
Black volcanic rock. The Atlantic below, grey and enormous, spray driving cold off the water. A path she didn’t recognize cutting along the cliff face. She turned back toward the tunnel entrance.
The tunnel entrance was not there.
Elise stood very still.
“Okay,” she said to the Icelandic wind. That was new.
She turned right and followed the path. Ten minutes of walking brought her back to the same outcropping—a crooked lava formation jutting toward the sea that she would have remembered from the first time if she’d passed it. She had not passed it the first time.
She tried the other direction.
Arrived at the same rock.
Her suitcase wheel caught in the gravel. She stared at the formation with mounting, unreasonable calm.
“No,” she said.
A chirp answered her.
Ketty sat on top of the rock. Yellow eyes, enormous, fixed on Elise with the feline attention of something that had all the time in the world and knew it. The cat’s tail moved once, slow and deliberate.
“Absolutely not,” Elise said.
Ketty blinked.
Then stepped off the rock and walked down a path that had not been there before .
Elise looked at the cliff. Looked at the path. Looked at her suitcase.
“I want it on record,” she said, to no one and everyone, “that I am a rational adult with a return flight and a network deal.”
Ketty glanced back.
Elise followed the cat.
The path twisted through volcanic stone before dropping into a low tunnel, rune-lit along the walls in pale gold.
She’d been afraid of tunnels a week ago.
The tightness still flickered at the edges but the bond was pulling at her chest now, warm and urgent, and she kept walking. Not because the fear was gone.
Because she chose to anyway.
The tunnel opened.
The cavern was enormous and fire-warm, cinnamon and smoke heavy in the air, rugs layered across the stone floor in deep reds. Gryla sat beside a hearth the size of a small room with something large on her knitting needles, and she looked up at Elise’s arrival with an arched eyebrow.
“Finally.”
Ketty leapt into her lap.
Elise set her suitcase down. “Did your cat just kidnap me?”
“She prefers guided intervention.” Gryla gestured at the chair across from her. “Sit. You look terrible.”
“Thank you.” Just what every woman wanted to hear.
“Not an insult. Heartbreak looks terrible on everyone. Even the ones who deserve it.”
Elise sat because her legs had apparently decided this was happening.
The fire crackled. The bond pulled low and constant in her chest, no longer the bright flare of proximity but something duller—the ache of distance.
Of him somewhere in the mountain and her in this chair and both of them being very noble about it.
“You love him,” Gryla said.
Not a question. Not even particularly gentle.
Elise exhaled. “Yes.”
“And he sent you away.”
“He told me to take the job.” She looked at the fire. “Very considerately.”
“He’s afraid,” Gryla said. “All my boys do that. Your father was the same.” She said this to Ketty, who offered no opinion. “Stenrik looks at everything he wants and builds the argument against it before he allows himself to want it. He’s been doing it for five hundred years.”
“That’s exhausting.”
“Yes.” Gryla’s needles clicked. “Imagine living with it.”
Elise pressed her fingers against her sternum where the ache sat heaviest. The bond pulsed back, a slow recognition. He’s there. He’s there. He’s there.
She’d thought it was just her—her own feeling magnified into something bigger than her because it was the first time she’d let someone in.
But it wasn’t just her. She’d known that since the hot springs, since she’d watched the runes blaze and heard Gryla arrive bellowing about daughters-in-law at maximum volume.
It went both ways.
He knew it went both ways.
And he’d sent her away, anyway.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said. It came out quieter than she meant it to. “My life isn’t—stationary. It never has been. And he’s—” she stopped.
“Here,” Gryla said simply. “He’s here.”
“Yes.”
The giantess set her knitting down and looked at Elise with the full weight of her entire history. “You think love means giving up who you are,” she said. “That staying means surrender.”
Elise opened her mouth.
“Your parents loved you,” Gryla said. “They loved the horizon more. You learned that those two things were the same.” She picked up her knitting again. “They’re not.”
The fire shifted. A log settled.
Elise thought about postcards from ports she’d never visited.
About the silence in boarding schools after everyone went home for breaks.
The way she’d learned to keep moving and not get close to anyone.
About building an entire life on the premise that if you were the one leaving, you couldn’t be the one left.
She thought about Stenrik in the kitchen before service with flour on his forearms, counting her in without being asked.
Seven places at the table.
He had counted her a place.
“Oh,” she said.
Gryla smiled. Said nothing.
Elise stood. The chair scraped against stone.
“The tunnel.” Gryla pointed at a narrow opening in the far wall. “He’ll be in his cave. Sulking productively, knowing him. Probably reorganizing the fermentation stores.”
Elise looked at the tunnel. Low ceiling. Dark. The old reflex moved through her chest, the instinct to stop, to calculate, to find a bigger way around.
The bond surged against it.
Not trapped. Choosing.
She picked up her bag and left the suitcase where it was and walked into the dark without stopping.