Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE TROLL FINALLY WENT OUTSIDE
T he dough didn’t deserve what he was doing to it.
Stenrik knew this. He was a chef. He understood that sourdough bread required patience, not aggression, that the gluten needed coaxing rather than this sustained assault he was currently visiting upon it.
He kept going anyway.
The cave was quiet. Fire crackling. Geothermal vents doing their slow, ancient business.
His hands in the dough and his mind somewhere it shouldn’t be, running the same four images on a loop: the way she’d looked when he told her to take the job.
The way she hadn’t argued. The way she’d looked disappointed as if expecting something else.
The note on his desk.
He’d read it twice before he put it face-down.
I think you’re being an idiot .
The bond sat in his chest like a coal—not the bright urgent pull of early days but something heavier, loaded down, permanent.
He pressed the heel of his hand into the dough and thought about five hundred years of being alone and decided that had been considerably easier before he’d known what he was missing.
She’s gone.
He’d heard the tunnel door. He’d heard the wheels of her suitcase on the volcanic rock, growing fainter. He’d retreated to his cave and let her go because he was noble, apparently, or self-destructive, or both. The family had never been clear on the distinction.
The tunnel at the far end of the cave flickered.
He didn’t look up. The rune-lights did that sometimes, geothermal pressure shifting in the deep channels beneath the floor. Then gravel shifted.
He looked up.
Elise stood in the mouth of the interior tunnel. Windblown. Breathing hard. Her hair loose and her coat half-off one shoulder, as if she’d been walking fast enough that it hadn’t mattered.
The dough hit the table.
She was real. She was here. She was staring at him like she hadn’t seen him in days. Hope fluttered in his chest, along with the mate bond.
“I changed my mind,” she said.
He opened his mouth.
“I’m not finished.” She pointed at him, one finger. “You had your dramatic sacrifice moment. Now it’s mine.”
Don’t— the sane part of him started. Don’t let her do this. Don’t let her talk herself into something she’ll regret later.
But he remained still. Barely.
“I spent my whole life thinking home was somewhere I hadn’t reached yet.
” Her voice shook, not from uncertainty but from the effort of saying it clearly, getting it right.
“Every city. Every kitchen. Every time I packed a bag I thought, maybe the next place is it.” She crossed toward him slowly. “But I wasn’t looking for a place. ”
The bond roared.
She stopped two feet away and looked at him with her chin level and her eyes bright and the truth of it written plainly across her face, no professional composure, no careful management, nothing between them at all.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “And I walked right past you, deciding I was leaving.”
Gods.
He had flour on his hands. This was somehow the only thought he was capable of—the completely irrelevant fact of flour on his hands— while the woman he’d been waiting for his whole long existence was standing in front of him.
“The contract—” he started, because apparently he was still trying to be reasonable even now, even with the bond clawing at the inside of his ribs.
“Can be negotiated.” She said it like it was obvious.
“Or deferred. Or structured differently.” A small unsteady laugh.
“I have a lawyer. That’s what lawyers do.
” Her gaze softened. “I don’t want to spend my life moving away from things, Stenrik.
I want to come back to something.” She stopped. “I want to come home to you.”
He crossed the distance and pulled her in.
Not carefully. He pulled her in the way the bond had been demanding since the moment it settled, arms around her and her face against his throat and her hands fisting into the back of his shirt.
He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, finally able to breath, and the weight of a very long loneliness finally leaving him.
“I love you,” he said into her hair, rough and graceless, because he was not a man for elegant declarations and she deserved the plain truth. “I have loved you since you told me my fermented shark tasted interesting, and I have been a thorough idiot about it ever since. ”
She made a sound against his throat that was equal parts laugh and a sob.
“I left a note,” she said.
“I read the note.”
“I called you an idiot in writing.”
“You were correct.” He pulled back enough to see her face, cupped it in both hands—flour and all, which she would probably have something to say about—and looked at her the way he’d wanted to all week. “Stay,” he said.
She kissed him before he finished.
Not the testing kind. Not the careful kind. The kind that meant she’d already decided and this was the confirmation. He kissed her back with everything he’d been holding back.
They made it to the bed the way they always seemed to manage things—with less ceremony than intended and more honesty than either of them had planned on.
Her coat went somewhere. His shirt followed.
She laughed when he navigated around a discarded blanket and he kissed the laugh from her mouth and she let him.
He touched her like he had all the time in the world. Because he did, now. Because she’d given him that.
No urgency driving his hands. Just her, the sounds she made, the way she arched into him, the way she said his name when he found a sensitive spot. He paid attention to all of it. He was thorough about loving her because he had all the time to do so.
She reached for him and her hands on his skin moved the bond from a low hum to something that rang throughout his entire body.
He kissed down her throat and she threaded her fingers into his hair and held on.
The runes on his arms were blazing again, casting slow gold patterns across the stone walls.
“There it is,” she said softly, watching them.
“Your fault,” he said against her collarbone .
“I’ll take it.”
When they came together it was nothing like the first time.
Not less but more. The first time had been discovery, all bright urgency and held breath.
This was something deeper, something that connected them on a soul deep level.
His forehead against hers, her hand in his, both of them unhurried and absolutely certain.
The bond pulled them tighter with every breath until the edges blurred between them.
He felt the moment it completed.
It moved through him like the geothermal heat through stone—total, structural, down to the deepest part of him. Not a flare. Not a surge. An anchoring. Like something that had been reaching finally found what it was reaching for and went still.
The cave hummed.
The runes blazed white—every mark on him, all at once—and she gasped sharply. He felt her accept the bond like a symphony playing, and he held her through it with his face pressed against her temple and his eyes shut.
Afterward they lay tangled together while the fire crackled and neither of them spoke for a long time.
The runes dimmed slowly to their low resting gold.
Her fingers traced one on his forearm, unhurried.
“That felt different,” she said.
“Yes.”
She tipped her head back to look at him her eyes full of questions.
“The bond is fully connected,” he said.
A pause. “Which means?”
“It means we’re mated on every level. It means you accepted it.”
A slow smile crossed her face. “I did. You’re the one for me. Forever.” Then her brow furrowed. “Does it change anything for you?”
“Besides spending forever with you?” He brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “Come with me.”
She looked at him with a puzzled expression. Then she sat up and pulled her sweater over her head. He put his shirt on. They dressed quickly and he took her hand and led her to the entrance to the outside, something he had not used ever.
At the cave entrance he lifted the heavy stone panel. Morning light poured in across the floor in a brilliant slant, and he stopped at the edge of it and looked at it the way a man looks at something he hasn’t seen in a very long time.
The warmth touched his hand.
Nothing.
No curse pulling him back. No weakness flooding through him. No summer magic reaching for the darkness in his blood. No tingle of his body turning to stone.
Just light.
Just warm.
He stepped out onto the mountainside and the Icelandic morning opened around him. Sky enormous above the black cliffs, the Atlantic silver and cold below, the air sharp and salt-clean and full of a world he hadn’t stood in for five hundred summers.
He tilted his face up.
Heat spread across his skin.
He heard Elise behind him go completely still.
The curse was done.
Because of her. Because she’d chosen to come down a tunnel in the dark and stand in front of him and say I was looking for you. Because she’d chosen him before she knew what it meant, which was the only way it could ever have worked—freely, without leverage, without him asking.
He turned .
She was standing in the cave mouth, bare feet on the warm stone threshold, watching him with tears on her face she clearly hadn’t noticed yet.
He held out his hand.
She crossed the threshold without hesitating.
He folded her in against his chest and they stood together in the morning light while the Atlantic threw itself against the cliffs below and the mountain breathed steadily at their backs and the bond settled between them, warm and complete and entirely unbothered by anything the world intended to throw at it.
“The show,” he said.
“Hm.”
“We negotiate the terms. You travel when the schedule allows. You come back.” He paused. “We come back. I’ve been told international kitchens are generally deficient. Someone should document this.”
She laughed into his chest—the helpless, complete kind. “You want to travel with me.”
“I want to go where you go.” He said it without hesitation. “Within reason.”
She pulled back to look at him. Her face in full daylight, something he realized he’d never seen before. The sun picking out warmth in her hair, making her eyes clear. She looked at him the way she looked at things she intended to keep.
“Deal,” she said.
He kissed her in the morning sun.
It felt, he thought, exactly like coming up from underground.