Page 7 of The Labyrinth
He gave a ghost of a smile.Looking directly at her, he shucked his spandex shorts and stood there in all his naked glory.A very mouthwatering man, only he wasn’texactlya man.With a smirk, he turned to a stack of clean clothes.She admired his very nice, tight ass, not embarrassed in the least she stared.
“How did you fit all of this under Central Park, and no one knows about it?”she asked.Just one of the many questions flying through her brain.
He twirled his index finger.“All of this was here long before it was a park.”
Another thing that blew her mind.
“Tell me how you got in here, because I know I never gave you a red card.”
“Red card?”
“An invitation to the fight.”
“Ah,” she replied, lifting her chin.“Snuck in.Did you kill Peter?”
“I did not.”His voice rang with truth.
“But you know what happened to him.”
“Actually, I don’t,” he said.There was a noise outside the door that grabbed their attention.“Stay here.I’ll be right back.”
As soon as he left, she hurried around to the desk.The place was a disaster.As she shuffled through papers, she found everything and nothing, mostly invoices and memos.A shuffle had her hurrying back around to sit in a chair.
“Trouble?”she asked dryly.
“Do you care?”
“No,” she replied.
He sat down on the chair behind the desk.“Did you manage to go through everything?”
“You’re terrible at organization.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like I can just advertise for employment.”Any levity disappeared when he leaned back in his chair to study her.“You should’ve never been able to recreate your steps to find this place.”
“Why?”
“It’s part of the labyrinth’s enchantment,” he explained.“You see, when Daedalus built the first labyrinth for my ancestor, Asterius, it had to keep changing to confuse the minotaur side of him.It wasn’t just that he was imprisoned by it, it also trapped him in his monster form.And if any of us get trapped like that, then our human side slowly, painfully dies, until all we’re left with is the husk of a beast.”
His words painted a very different picture from what had been going through her head.Demonized in a world where it was wrong to be different.
“So, you use the labyrinth to make a living?”
He shrugged.“Might as well use the curse I’d been given to my advantage.I wasn’t the first minotaur, and I’m not the only.But I damn sure will be the richest.”
Marion thought about her own life.Stuck in a small-town job she hated.Do one thing wrong and everyone knows about it by suppertime.She couldn’t fault him for finding a lucrative way to use his unique situation.
“You said you snuck in,” he continued.“How?”
“A large group of people came through the pipe, and I blended with them.Although, the woman trying to sniff me now makes a lot more sense.”
“You’re turning out to be very resourceful.”He frowned.“The outside guards got complacent.I’ll have to switch them out.”
“Are you going to kill them?”
“You’re very fixated on me killing something.”
“Maybe because I just watched you kill an animal.”Horror filled her.“Or was that boar like you?Did you murder someone?”
