Time, once the most fluid and trivial of commodities in Adrian Montague Godfrey IV's universe, had calcified into something cruel and unrelenting. It no longer flowed. It throbbed. It marched. It sat on his chest like a stone god of judgment, ticking away the seconds like a metronome of decay.
He could feel it.
Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract, poetic sense that people used to describe aging or fading relevance.
No, Adrian felt death in the very beat of his heart. In the absence of beat, too. In the strange moments of suspended silence when his pulse would vanish for a second, maybe two, and his vision would gray out around the edges like an old film reel melting in the projector.
He never knew when those moments would come. He only knew they were happening more often.
It was an obscene irony—he could feel his life peeling away, layer by layer, while simultaneously desperately loving it for the first time.
He didn't just want to live anymore. He knew what living was now. Not the caviar and chartered jets and weekends in Monte Carlo with girls who barely knew his name. That hadn't been life. That had been a drug—luxury injected into his boredom like a sedative.
This—this agonising fight, this daily routine of dragging his broken body across the coals of rehabilitation, this silent, burning hunger to breathe, to survive, to even ache properly—this was life.
And he had wasted it.
All of it.
He'd wasted twenty-three years not knowing what it was to want to wake up in the morning because your heart might stop before the sun set. He had wasted time chasing oblivion because he thought it would protect him from pressure. From legacy. From the weight of his name.
But now?
Now he hated what he had done.
He despised the boy in the old photographs: smug, thick around the edges, stuffed into bespoke suits that strained at the belly. Laughing like he owned the world. Asleep on the board of directors, physically and intellectually. Going through the motions of the heir, when he didn't even care enough to know what the company did.
He wanted to slap that boy. Shake him. Starve him. Strip him down to the bone and scream:
"You don't know what your life is worth!"
But he had no one to scream it to. Because that boy was gone now.
And the man who had replaced him was dying slowly, minute by minute, heartbeat by failed heartbeat.
—
The most wretched part of it all, Adrian discovered, was not the pain.
It wasn't the dizzy spells, or the fevers, or the vomiting, or the long, trembling hours after each workout when he collapsed on the floor with tears leaking out the sides of his eyes.
It was the waiting.
The way time moved now—bloated, stretched thin, yet horrifyingly precise. Each morning he woke wondering if this would be the day his heart simply… stopped. No grand event. No fireworks. Just a quiet shutdown. A blank screen.
Some nights, he didn't sleep at all. He was too afraid that if he closed his eyes, he wouldn't open them again. So he sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows, knees to chest, watching London sprawl beneath him, lit like a dying star.
The city pulsed. He did not.
He watched people live without knowing what it meant.
He envied them.
Not for their wealth—he had more.
Not for their power—he could command nations with his surname.
But for their ignorance.
They didn't have to think about the number of beats left in their chest.
He did.
Every minute.
And as he waited, the weight of reality came down like a vice around his skull. For the first time in his life, Adrian wasn't thinking about legacy, or pressure, or what his father would say, or how he looked on the society pages.
He was thinking about himself.
His own life.
His own lungs. His own hands, now veined and pale from the medication. His own knees, scarred from crawling after workouts too brutal for a healthy man, let alone a dying one.
He thought about whether he would ever know what it was like to fall in love. Not the expensive, glamorous kind. The real kind. The kind that saw you weak and didn't flinch.
He thought about whether he would ever have a purpose. Not a title. Not a chairmanship. A purpose. A reason to wake up that didn't revolve around preserving the illusion of invincibility.
He thought about the children he would never have. The friends he'd never make because the ones from before had only wanted his name, his parties, his plane.
He hated that now—now—when he was finally able to feel, to see, to know himself, it was too late.
It was like being handed the keys to your kingdom a day before the entire world burned.
And there were moments—moments so raw and vile and honest—that he would fall to the floor after a failed set of squats or after waking up from a blackout, and he would scream into his clenched fists until his voice broke.
"Why now?"
"Why didn't I know this earlier?"
"Why wasn't I allowed to be this version of me when I had time?"
There were no answers.
Only the ticking of the biomonitor on his wrist.
Only the soft static of his own blood struggling to flow through a failing organ.
—
The transplant list remained silent.
Not even a flicker of hope.
The doctors said the odds were low. His blood type, rare. His condition, too advanced for elective consideration but not yet catastrophic enough to leapfrog over others.
He was in purgatory.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Just waiting.
And so he became even more reclusive.
He stopped answering the calls.
Cassandra, persistent, had sent three letters—handwritten, sealed with her wax crest. He burned them without reading.
Julian had posted an Instagram story tagging him with: "@adr1angodfrey dropped off the face of the earth. Or maybe he is the earth now. Miss you, fatty."
He laughed. It was painful. But sincere.
Genevieve, oddly, had left a voicemail. Her voice, typically crisp and removed, was different this time. Warmer, though still reluctant.
"If you are indeed in Switzerland, as I hope, I want you to know… I regret a few things. We all do. We didn't always give you the space to be more than the heir. I… suppose I should have told you that earlier. Come home when you're ready."
He listened to it twice.
Then deleted it.
Because home was inside him now.
The old world—the palace, the legacy, the velvet-lined trap of his bloodline—it meant nothing now.
All he had was this dying body.
This gasping mind.
This need to live—not for them, not for power, but for himself.
And in that war room of silence, where each day felt more fragile than the last, Adrian Montague Godfrey IV finally understood what it meant to be human.
Not an heir.
Not a vessel.
Just a man with a dying heart and a life he would never again take for granted.
He waited.
Still alive.
Still fighting.
Even as the darkness licked at the edges of him.