Horns.Actual, literal horns. Growing from his head.
My lungs seemed to forget their function. My breath caught, trapped somewhere between my chest and throat, refusing to move in either direction. The café around us blurred at the edges, my vision tunneling to focus solely on those horns—their smooth curve, their solid reality in a world where such things should not, could not exist.
Rion must have noticed my expression, because he quickly reached up to adjust his hat. But it was too late. We both knew what I’d seen.
“Shit,” he muttered, the first colloquialism I’d heard from him. He glanced around the café, but no one else was paying attention to our corner.
My mind raced, frantically trying to process what my eyes were telling it.
Horns.He has horns. People don’t have horns. Some animals have horns. Mythological creatures have horns. Mythological creatures aren’t real.
But he’s sitting right across from me.
This isn’t possible.
But it’s happening.
Am I having a mental breakdown? Did someone drug my chai? Is this an elaborate prank?
Those horns looked very, very real.
Rion sighed, a sound like wind through ancient ruins. “I apologize for the…surprise.” He spoke the word as if it were a gross understatement, which it absolutely was. “I should have perhaps been more forthcoming about my nature.”
“Your… nature,” I repeated, the words mechanical.
He shifted uncomfortably, and I noticed how the booth seemed almost comically small for his frame. “Yes. It tends to complicate matters.”
My brain finally managed to push past its initial blue-screen-of-death moment and form a coherent thought.I’m sitting across from a minotaur.
Not a man with an unusual medical condition. Not an elaborate costume. A minotaur. A creature from Greek mythology. Half man, half bull. The monster of the labyrinth.
Except he didn’t look like a monster. Imposing, yes. Frightening in his difference, perhaps. But sitting there, awkwardly trying to fit his massive body into a standard café booth, avoidingeye contact as he waited for my reaction… he looked more embarrassed than threatening.
That realization somehow helped me find my voice. “You’re… not human.”
Brilliant observation, Clara. Really insightful.
His mouth twitched, almost a smile. “No. I am not.”
He opened his coat slightly, revealing more of his neck and upper chest. What I’d initially taken for an unusually textured shirt was actually short, dense fur—brown-black and sleek, covering what appeared to be powerfully muscled shoulders. The fur grew thicker around his neck, forming what looked almost like a mane.
Heat radiated from him, perceptible even across the table, like sitting near a hearth on a winter night. It was oddly comforting, that warmth, despite everything else being utterly terrifying.
“You’re a minotaur,” I whispered, the word feeling strange on my tongue. A word I’d read thousands of times in books but never expected to speak as a literal description.
He nodded once, the movement careful, as if he was concerned his horns might knock something over if he moved too vigorously. “Yes.”
The simplicity of his confirmation broke something loose in my brain. My librarian’s mind—the part that cataloged, cross-referenced, and analyzed—suddenly kicked into high gear, like a defense mechanism against the impossibility sitting across from me.
Minotaur. Greek mythology. The offspring of Queen Pasiphaë of Crete and a white bull sent by Poseidon. Kept in the Labyrinthdesigned by Daedalus. Slain by Theseus with the help of Ariadne’s thread.
But that was a myth. A story. Not a being who texts about ladder structural integrity and brings diagrams to café meetings.
I found myself mentally reviewing every book on mythology I’d ever shelved. Were there details I’d missed? Some footnote that suggested minotaurs were real, living among us, occasionally offering construction advice to librarians?
“In the myths,” I began, then stopped, suddenly worried about offending him. “I mean, in the stories…there was only one Minotaur.TheMinotaur. Is that… Was that…?”
“A simplification,” he replied, his deep voice kept low. “There are not many of us. But more than one.”
