Lahat ng Kabanata ng Marked By Hell: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Elizabeth turned away from Malachor without answering him. Not in defiance. Not in fear. Simply in refusal to finish the moment while it was still demanding something of her. The space he occupied cooled as she did, the pressure easing, the nearness loosening its grip. The shadows receded to their corners. The weight lifted just enough to breathe. And though she did not hear him leave, she knew he had—because the silence that remained was not empty, but wounded. Elizabeth knelt because her body remembered how. The floor was cold beneath her knees, the stone unyielding, familiar in its discomfort. She had not chosen the place carefully. The habit no longer required intention. It surfaced in her muscles the way pain did—automatic, unquestioned. Her door was still barred from the outside. The house held the stale, breathless quiet of a space denied use. No water. No fire. The fever had climbed again, pressing

They did not wait for her to die. That became clear when the bar was lifted from the outside. Elizabeth was drifting in and out of a shallow, burning sleep when the sound reached her—wood scraping against wood, as if the door itself might protest if handled too roughly. For a moment she thought it was a dream, another fever-vision stitched together from memory and dread. Then the latch lifted. Light cut across the floor in a hard, unfamiliar angle. She tried to sit up. The effort failed halfway. Her body felt wrong—too heavy and too light at once, limbs sluggish and unreliable, joints loose as though they no longer belonged to her. The fever had climbed again in the night, cresting into relentlessness. Heat pulsed behind her eyes. Her thoughts slid away from her even as she reached for them. “Elizabeth.” The voice came from the doorway. Father Aldric.

Darkness closed around her like a second burial. Elizabeth did not know how long she lay beneath the weight of the dead. Time had no shape here—only pressure, heat, the slow theft of air. Bodies pressed against her from every side, slack and unresisting, their stillness obscene in its certainty. Cloth tangled with cloth. Limbs pinned her ribs, her legs, her throat. The earth above muffled sound until even her own screams felt swallowed before they could finish forming. Her chest burned. Each breath was a negotiation she was losing. She clawed uselessly at what surrounded her, fingers scraping against rough wool, against skin already cooling, against nothing that would give. Her mouth opened again and again, pulling in air that tasted of rot and soil and sickness. Her vision tunneled, black closing in from the edges. She thought of the stream. Of cold water.

He set her down where the ground was no longer grave-damp but cool and clean fern-soft beneath her bare feet. Night had opened wide above them—no pit walls, no pressing bodies, only the long, quiet breath of the forest and the distant, patient stars. Elizabeth swayed. Her fever still burned, but it no longer ruled her. Malachor’s hands remained at her waist, steadying without restraint. Solid. Warm. Real. She lifted her eyes and took him in fully. Darkness lay along his shoulders and down the planes of his body like a mantle he had chosen rather than a prison he wore. Elizabeth breathed. The sound came out broken. She swayed again, and he drew her closer to keep her upright. Her forehead rested briefly against his chest. She felt the rise and fall beneath her cheek, slow and deliberate, the rhythm of something that did not hurry because it did not need

With a savage snarl, Malachor yanked her off his cock, strings of spit connecting her gasping mouth to his glistening tip. His claws raked down her nightgown, ripping the soaked fabric apart in one brutal tear. The cool night air hit her exposed skin, her full breasts bouncing free, nipples pebbled and begging. Elizabeth shivered, naked now, her pussy throbbing with need as she stared at his towering, muscular body. He scooped her up effortlessly, one arm under her, the other cradling her back like she weighed nothing. His cock, still rock-hard and slick from her throat, rubbed against her wet folds as he carried her across the ruins. The thick head nudged her clit with each step, smearing her juices along his length, sending jolts of fire through her veins. She whimpered, wrapping her legs around his waist instinctively, grinding against him, the friction making her clit pulse. Malachor reached the ancie