John closed his eyes and took a deep breath before opening them and speaking to her. "Mary, honey, listen to me," he said, running his hand over her hair. "there wasn't a damned thing you could have done to stop it. "He-those demons in Hell," he corrected, because right now, the idea it was one of the worst in the Pit was still a sick suspicion, nothing more, though the suspicion grew with Mary's words, "some of them do what they do because they see it just like that. Fascinating, like some kind of goddamned art."
It was a hard balance between reassuring her and telling her the truth, softening the details to save her more pain or giving her the details so she understood there wasn't anything she could have done.
"As for me, you shouldn't be thinking like that." He didn't want her thinking about that, because those two stretches of time he'd spent tortured were still overshadowed by the two stretches of time he'd been the one torturing things. Eventually she would stop seeing what had been done to him and start seeing the monster he was.