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Audiences want contradictory things. They want to fall in love with a character, and once they fall in love with them, they don't want anything bad to happen to the person they love. 

But, of course, they also want excitement, adventure, peril, and woe, or else they will get bored because nothing is happening in the story. 

Your job, as an author, then, is to hurt the one that the reader loves. And so you are always on the cusp of the reader hating you. 

When we talk about the necessity for tension in a story, this is where most of that tension comes from. It is the same fear a parent feels when they see their child undertake some perilous achievement: riding a bike, going away to college, taking a vacation with friends. They want the pleasure that will come with seeing the child succeed, and their heart clenches at the possibility of seeing their child hurt. 

There is something in us that craves that feeling of anxious hope, and for that fix we turn to stories. Your job, as an author, is to keep the reader poised in that ecstatic moment between anxiety and hope. You can expect them to complain bitterly if betray either their anxiety or their hope. 

Equally, though, you can't let the story or the characters stand still. Anxiety decays quickly, so to keep the needle in the green zone, you have to keep feeding in new causes for anxiety, and similarly meting out hope to maintain the balance. 

In this case, it sounds like you overcooked the dish. You added too much anxiety and not enough hope and the readers crashed out of the bliss zone. 

So you need to find a way to restore the balance while continuing to up the ante. One way to do that might be by foreshadowing her fall. This will have the effect of buffering the anxiety, spreading out its effect over a longer period so that the reader does not crash out of the green zone when the defection happens. Or it might come from providing a countervailing hope. 

Or you might have to find new readers with darker tastes. The green zone is not in the same place in every reader's heart.