All Chapters of Marked by the Alpha: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

ZaraWe ran, and the whole cavern ran with us, a thundering wave of bare feet and dragging boots that filled every inch of dark behind me like water finding the shape of a container."There." Ryan's hand found mine and pulled hard toward a gap in the rock wall, a crack barely wide enough for a body to slip through sideways. "Through there, go.""That's not big enough for both of us.""It's big enough for you so move.""I'm not leaving you behind for a gap in a wall, Ryan.""Then argue with me on the other side of it." He shoved me toward the opening, and the stone bit into my shoulders as I forced myself through, breath scraping out of me in short furious gasps, and behind me I heard him grunt as he wedged his broader frame after me, cursing under his breath the whole way."Ryan, hurry, they're not slowing down.""I'm aware."He tore through a heartbeat later, stumbling into me hard enough that we both went down again, tangled together on cold stone, and for one suspended second neith

ZaraDarkness came and went in waves, and every time it pulled back I was somewhere different, Ryan's arms under my knees, his heartbeat slamming against my ear, the world tilting sideways as he ran."Stay with me." His voice, low, cracked at the edges. "Zara, please.""I'm trying." My own voice sounded wrong to me, thick, like it was coming from somewhere underwater.The heat under my skin hadn't stopped since the stairwell. It moved in pulses, up through my chest, into my throat, and every pulse brought another flash of the thing I'd seen when my eyes went red. A room that wasn't a room. A mouth with no bottom."Where are we going?""East door. Marcus said east door.""Marcus helped us?""Don't talk. Save it."I wanted to tell him I didn't have anything left to save it for, that whatever was happening to me felt less like dying and more like being rearranged, piece by piece, into something that wouldn't need breath the same way. But talking took less out of me than thinking, so I ke

ZaraThe ground opened like an eye and it was not a crack, not a fissure, an eye, and I understood that the moment it happened, some instinct older than tonight telling me exactly what I was looking at even as my body refused to process it. The stone beneath us peeled back in a slow spiral, wet and dark and gleaming, and beneath it was more dark, except this dark had a shape to it, a depth that pulled at my eyes the way a held breath pulls at your lungs.Ryan's arm came around my waist before I'd even started to fall."I've got you." His voice was strained, ribs screaming with every word, but his grip didn't waver. "Don't look down.""I can't not look down, Ryan, it's everywhere."The floor kept widening beneath us, an inch at a time, patient the way it had been patient all night, like it had already decided this was going to happen and was only waiting for us to accept it too. My boots found less and less stone to stand on. Ryan's found none at all on one side, and I heard him grunt

ZaraThe pull didn't feel like hands. It felt like the dark itself had decided to have an opinion about where I belonged, and its opinion was somewhere far away from Ryan.I hit something that wasn't ground, wasn't air, somewhere in between, and then I was standing again, upright, like whatever had taken me had set me down carefully instead of dropping me. That was worse, somehow. Careful meant intention. Careful meant I mattered enough to handle gently."Ryan!"My voice came back wrong, flattened, like the space around me was too small to hold an echo, even though every instinct in my body said the opposite was true, said this place went on forever in every direction.Nothing answered. I made myself breathe. In through the nose, four counts, out through the mouth, four counts, the way I'd taught myself back when panic used to own me instead of the other way around. It didn't help much. It never fully did. But it kept my knees from folding, and right now that was the only job that mat

ZaraThe world went white where Ryan's arm disappeared into that hand, and then it went silent in a way that had weight, that pressed against my eardrums like water at the bottom of a lake."Ryan!"My own voice came back muffled, wrong, like I was screaming into a pillow instead of a room. I still had fistfuls of his shirt. I could still feel the heat of his back against my palms but the pull yanked through him and into me, some invisible thread cinching tight between my chest and that black crack in the door, and I understood, half a second too late, what he'd figured out first.It wasn't using him to get to me. It was using me to get to it."Let go of him." I didn't know who I was talking to anymore, the woman, the dark, the door, maybe all three at once. "Let go of him, take me instead, that's what you want, isn't it, that's what I promised...""Zara, no." Ryan's voice was wrecked, more growl than words, but he heard me, and I felt his whole body lock up trying to twist between me