The body was a machine.
Adrian Montague Godfrey IV had heard that phrase a thousand times, mostly from personal trainers he barely listened to between bites of brioche and truffled caviar. It had always sounded like philosophy to him—something one said when sculpting abs for the paparazzi, or when explaining away the sorcery of athletes whose sinew glistened like marble beneath stadium lights. But never once, not for a breath or a heartbeat, had he considered that the phrase might apply to him.
His body had never felt like a machine.
It had felt like a monument.
A sluggish, sweating, wheezing edifice of indulgence and decay. A temple built to sloth. A kingdom of soft flesh where appetites reigned supreme and discipline was drowned in foie gras.
But now—after the collapse, after the whisper of death had slithered down his throat and kissed the very marrow of him—now he looked in the mirror and saw not a monument, but a time bomb.
Ticking. Cracking. Waiting.
And so, he declared war.
—
The doctors said, rest.
The doctors said, stabilize.
The doctors said, avoid stress and exertion.
But Adrian Montague Godfrey IV had spent twenty-three years obeying—obeying appetite, obeying weakness, obeying the low hum of inherited decadence that told him he would never have to earn anything.
Now he was done obeying.
If death was coming, it would not find him supine in silk sheets, wheezing into a respirator. No, it would have to chase him. Through fire. Through ice. Through pain and breath and blood.
He began in secret.
The penthouse gym had been ornamental for years, its chrome weights and elliptical machines gathering dust like relics in a sarcophagus. He had dismissed the staff, sealed the doors, and woken at four in the morning with the breath of war in his lungs.
At first, the attempts were pitiful.
He tried to jog, and his legs rebelled. His chest burned like a furnace set to purge. He vomited bile into a gold-plated bin. His knees cracked. His vision blackened. The world tilted.
He collapsed on the rubber flooring, gasping, heart fluttering like a dying moth.
He thought: This is it. I'm dying right here in a pair of overpriced trainers.
But he didn't die.
So he got up.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Each morning, he rose with dawn and went to war with his body. He stripped the gym of distractions—no music, no mirrors, no trainers, no performance. Only the silence. Only the breath. Only the scream of failing muscle and the stutter of a heart that could not keep up.
He trained like a man possessed. Like a man who had something to prove and nothing to lose. He read physiology textbooks in the evening, studying his own weaknesses as if they were corporate liabilities to be trimmed. He monitored his pulse, tracked every heartbeat, every falter, every irregularity.
The doctors found out quickly, of course. A nurse spotted the bruises. The numbers didn't lie. Dr. Leticia Morton arrived at his penthouse unannounced one morning, stormed through the marble lobby like a general entering hostile territory, and demanded an explanation.
"What in the hell are you trying to do?" she snapped, slamming down a clipboard on his marble countertop. "You could kill yourself—you are killing yourself."
Adrian, drenched in sweat, his body trembling from the morning's climb on the assault bike, met her eyes with something colder than defiance.
"I'm already dying," he said simply. "Let me do it on my terms."
"You're throwing away any chance of a transplant—"
"Do you know how many people are ahead of me on that list?" he interrupted, voice low, shaking. "Do you know how many lives have to end before mine is considered worth salvaging?"
Morton opened her mouth.
He continued.
"I'm not gambling on a miracle. I'm buying time. Not by waiting—but by fighting."
"You're overexerting a heart that can barely function—"
"I was overexerting it for twenty-three years by doing nothing."
Silence.
She watched him, eyes narrowing. Something in her expression shifted—not approval, not yet—but the first hint of reluctant understanding.
She left. Warned him again. Threatened to report his non-compliance. He told her to do what she must.
And returned to the treadmill.
—
He began medical treatments too—experimental, obscure, obscurely expensive. He contacted specialists in Switzerland, Singapore, Boston, Seoul. He had entire labs converted into private clinics. Under false names, he signed up for trials too dangerous for public consumption—immunosuppressive infusions meant to prepare the body for transplantation, despite no donor heart in sight.
He endured side effects in silence.
Hair loss. Vomiting. Fevers. Bone pain so searing he thought he was being hollowed out with acid. He lay on the bathroom floor more nights than he slept in bed.
But he never stopped training.
The body responded—grudgingly, slowly, violently. The fat began to loosen its hold. His face, once moonlike and puffy, began to show hints of structure beneath. The suits no longer fit. His breathing grew steadier. His gait more deliberate.
But the heart—the heart remained weak.
It pulsed like an old war drum, ragged and unpredictable.
There were days it skipped so hard he tasted metal. Nights where he woke gasping, convinced he was dying. Once, in the middle of a deadlift, his vision went dark and he collapsed, knocking over two machines. He came to ten minutes later, alone, face-down on the floor.
He got up again.
Because this wasn't about winning.
It was about not losing like before.
He knew the end could come at any time. Knew his efforts might never be rewarded. That a heart might never arrive. That the odds were stacked, suffocatingly, against him.
But he also knew this:
When the final moment came—when the darkness clawed its way into his chest again, when breath failed and vision dimmed—he would meet it standing.
Not lounging.
Not bloated.
Not forgotten.
Standing.
Breathing.
Fighting.
Like a Godfrey.
Like the heir he had never been allowed to be, until death itself forced his hand.
And if he died, so be it.
But at least this time, it would be on his terms.
At least this time, he would die as the man he should have been all along.
Not the joke.
Not the ghost.
But the monarch of his own mortality.