I will possess your heart - Rhys Montrose X Reader

───Part 12.

Rhys ensorcelled you with the sweet strawberry marmalade he smeared across your skin, delicately lacing the cynical puncture wounds dispersed across your being with shards of himself. He fell deeper into the depths of your mind through them, cleaning away the cobwebs that clung to every part of you and treated the pieces he found of you beneath all the grime and dust as though they were holy trinkets.

You were addicted to his touch, to the way he breathed life into the ruins left behind by the plague you called mother. He was electrifying, temptation and divinity packed into the sapphire disks with which he dissected you gently. Memorizing his name in every language, his lips chisel away the layers of the fort you'd hidden your soul away, coaxing it to come closer to him as he ran his fingertips along it.

Rhys was made of saffron and you found yourself starving whenever you parted ways with him, lapping up the traces of it when he called, yearning for him to bury you between his arms again and quiet the static that loved to sneak up on you and devour you whole.

You thought it'd reign superior, throwing you back into the abyss, the black hole spiraling out of control when you'd filled up the fridge in your mother's den for Amanda, to make sure she had a lifeline and a chance to survive, as molten lava bubbled beneath your skin when the hag made her appearance, and Rhys waiting patiently outside the apartment complex for you to return with an ocean at his disposal.

He flooded your system with the cooling water when he intertwined your hands, asking if you were okay, having seen the smoke rising from your eyes, disrupting the molten lava inside. It fought for its survival, breaking into blobs and pieces trying to keep its hold on you, but he cast away the igneous rocks that threatened to drag you down with them and pressed a kiss against your temple.

He didn't poke and prod, questioning it's existence beyond a brief sentence proclaiming that you hated your mother, dropping the subject at your behest and distracting you with the glacé sound his vocal cords produced, he cramped the oncoming rot lurking in the shadows into a small fly that buzzed in your skull. Annoying as it was, it's existence unperishable, he made it tolerable, making sure it couldn't find its footing again as long as he remained in your mind - which he, without a doubt, would for as long as your lungs kept expanding and your heart beating, and even then the mere presence of him would bring you back to life easily.

It wasn't until the next day, when you spilled the contents of the enclosure within your vault in which you kept your mother's sins and lies in that you realized just how deeply the heavenly tendrils of his ran through you, wondering what on earth made him favor you over everyone else, when there were millions upon millions of people that were more deserving of his sacred presence. When there were shrines built in his honor inside their furnished rib cages that held no traces of wear and tear and damage unlike your own.

But you were glad he'd chosen you. That he'd shown no signs of boredom or encumbrance from keeping you so close to his heart. That he'd carved your name so deeply within the organ that it had seared into his soul - a patch of facula that could never be removed.

If only Lucille could see how much he meant to you already, and you to him.

Days had passed and you'd still not heard a word from her, with the only evidence she was around being the fresh flowers you'd find at her partners grave each day (you swore she'd stopped by the apartment one night, but you'd been too tired and exhausted from work to leave your bed and talk to her).