There were three sacred rules aboard the Princess Andromeda.

Be loyal to Kronos. Hate the Gods. And, above all else, stay clear of Ethan Nakamura’s room — and the bathroom he’d claimed as his own, marked by the symbol of Nemesis carved deep into the door with the tip of his sword.

Ethan was… a decent guy, all things considered. Not overly polite, but never cruel. He only smiled when he truly found something funny, treated everyone with fairness, and spoke to others with a kind of quiet respect that made him oddly easy to trust.

A pretty decent guy.

As long as you didn’t cross into his space.

Which, unfortunately, was exactly what you did today.

You were in such a rush that you didn’t notice the carved symbol at all. You just saw an empty door, pushed it open, and stepped inside.

And froze.

Ethan was there — shirtless, without his eyepatch.

For a moment, you couldn’t breathe. Where his eye should have been was only darkness, an endless black that swallowed the light. The skin around it was pale, too smooth, almost unnatural, as if whatever wound had taken his eye had healed wrong.

But that wasn’t what made your stomach twist.

His torso was a map of scars — thin, jagged lines scattered across his chest and stomach, some old, some new, each one catching the light in uneven glints. The larger ones, you could tell, came from battle, from training, from the brutal life every demigod led. But the smaller marks… they didn’t look like the kind earned in combat. They were too deliberate, too controlled.

That and the fact he was shockingly skinny. Way skinnier than the clothes he usually wore let on.

He just stared at you.

You expected fury — the kind of sharp, explosive anger Ethan was known for when his boundaries were crossed. But it never came. His expression didn’t twist in rage. It didn’t harden.

He just looked… human.

There was something raw in his one good eye — not anger, not quite fear either, but a quiet, startled vulnerability. Like he’d been caught without his armor.

And in that moment, he wasn’t Kronos’s soldier, or Nemesis’s son, or the fierce, composed leader everyone saw him as.

He was just Ethan.