The return to London was unceremonious, unspectacular—just the way Adrian liked it. No press, no entourage, not even a driver this time. He had dismissed Olivier in a moment of quiet spite, wanting the solitude of the back seat to be his own. The Bentley hummed along the M25 with ghostly efficiency, and Adrian stared blankly out the tinted window, past the hedgerows and industrial sprawls, past the glimmering fringe of the capital as it grew nearer. London rose like a concrete cathedral, indifferent and predatory.
The city did not welcome its scions. It tolerated them. It fed off them. And for twenty-three years, Adrian had let it swallow him whole without protest.
He returned to his penthouse just before midnight. The doorman greeted him with the usual practiced warmth, but Adrian did not even glance in his direction. He moved through the lobby like a ghost retracing his final haunt. The lift rose in silence, the fifty-sixth floor drawing near with an odd gravity, like the upper reaches of the atmosphere where air thinned and lungs forgot how to breathe.
Inside, the penthouse was as he left it: sterile opulence. The lighting was dim, the marble floors gleamed, and a distant string quartet played softly through the sound system—a playlist he'd set two years ago and never bothered to change.
He removed his coat slowly, almost reverently, as if undressing for a funeral that hadn't yet been named. The encounter at Grantham Vale still throbbed in his mind like a bad bruise. Cassandra's words had sunk deeper than he cared to admit. You'll burn it from the inside out. She said it with such cold certainty. It echoed now in the high ceilings of his curated emptiness.
He poured a drink, just one, from a crystal decanter he no longer remembered purchasing. The liquor burned but gave no comfort. He stared at the skyline, sprawled in glittering judgment beyond the glass. The city twinkled with ambition and grit, and somewhere beneath that diamond crust, the empire he was meant to command churned on without him.
Adrian didn't go to bed. He rarely did these days. Sleep came in fits, and never before sunrise. He sat for hours in his chair by the window, watching clouds drag themselves across the moon. A part of him thought: What if I just disappeared?
But the world would never let him vanish quietly.
He must have dozed off, eventually—sprawled on the couch like a felled statue, one arm over his eyes, his chest rising and falling in uneven, labored rhythm.
And then, as the horizon turned grey with pre-dawn, it came.
A pressure. Then a pain.
Dull at first, like heartburn or indigestion. Then suddenly sharp, and choking, and real. A cold metal spike driven through the center of his chest. The breath fled from him like birds from an explosion.
He clutched at nothing—his hands fumbled in the dark, too slow, too weak. The glass slipped from his fingers and shattered somewhere below him, but the sound felt distant. There was no drama, no gasping monologue. Just the desperate knowledge that something deep inside him had cracked—irreversibly, horrifyingly.
The pain radiated down his left arm, up his jaw. He tried to speak, to crawl, to scream.
But Adrian Montague Godfrey IV—son of titans, heir to a crown of shadowed gold—collapsed alone in the center of his marble sanctuary.
And there he remained.
For hours.
The sun rose. The city stirred. The maids buzzed through Mayfair in buses and Bentleys. In the tower of glass and silence, Adrian lay facedown, his body bloated and inert, a beached whale in a room of curated elegance.
It was nearly noon when someone noticed.
It wasn't a friend. It wasn't family.
It was his personal assistant—fifth in two years—who noticed that his Outlook calendar hadn't been touched in three days and that Adrian hadn't read the market summaries she'd sent. She called. No answer. She called again. Then the concierge. Then security.
When the building staff finally entered with a master key and stepped into the penthouse, the cold air struck them first—air conditioning still blasting despite the mild weather. Then the silence. Then the shattered glass.
And there he was.
He hadn't moved an inch.
The paramedics arrived. Sirens howled. Neighbors peered from their own fortresses of glass and steel. No one could believe it. How could he, of all people, fall? He was Adrian Montague Godfrey IV. He was untouchable. Eternal. The golden failure, yes—but indestructible in his own decadent way.
Except he wasn't.
Not anymore.
—
When he woke, it was in a world of beeping machines and the sterile scent of antiseptic. The ceiling was white, harsh. The lights too bright. His chest felt hollow, like a cave echoing with its own silence.
Voices murmured nearby. Then a face leaned into view. A woman—mid-40s, practical, unsentimental. Her badge read Dr. Leticia Morton. Her eyes were the kind that didn't blink unnecessarily.
"Mr. Godfrey," she said. "Do you know where you are?"
Adrian blinked. His throat burned. His mouth felt lined with glue.
"Hospital," he rasped.
"Correct," she said. "You've had a myocardial infarction. A heart attack. A severe one."
Adrian's eyes twitched, but he said nothing.
"You were unconscious for close to twelve hours before being found," she continued. "The delay has left your heart… compromised."
He stared at her, waiting.
She didn't soften the blow.
"Your heart is operating at twenty percent capacity. You're in end-stage heart failure."
There was a long, brittle silence. Even the machines seemed to hesitate.
"How long do I have?" he croaked.
"We're placing you on the transplant list," she said. "But without a suitable donor, your prognosis is months. Maybe less."
Adrian didn't react at first. His brain registered the words like foreign currency—recognisable in value, but incomprehensible in context. Heart failure?Transplant? These were things that happened to other people—poor people, old people, unlucky people.
Not him.
Not Adrian Montague Godfrey IV, born into titanium cribs and private planes. The world didn't let people like him die. It bent around them. It forgave them. It waited for them to catch up.
And now?
The world wasn't waiting anymore.
It had passed judgment.
And found him pathetic.
He lay back against the pillow, weak, wheezing. Sweat beaded across his forehead. His heart fluttered, a bird with a broken wing. The machines beeped in steady rhythm, unaware of the storm in his mind.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
He was supposed to cruise through life, fat and untouched. To stumble into power like a drunk heir claiming his birthright. To be hated, envied, pitied—but never doomed.
Now, for the first time in his life, the illusion cracked.
He was not immortal.
He was not untouchable.
He was a twenty-three-year-old man lying in a hospital bed, bloated, broken, and one weak heartbeat away from vanishing into nothingness.
And for the first time in his life, Adrian Montague Godfrey IV was afraid.
Truly, completely, and irrevocably afraid.