“What’s wrong?” Kay felt that her husband was inordinately quiet. Something was obviously bothering him.

He was quiet for a moment, as if considering whether to say anything.

“You know when I said that Sanat Kumar hated women, never loved and never married?”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid that I later thought of something that contradicts that. I think he actually did marry, in his own way”.

“What do you mean, in his own way? How many ways are there?”, she smiled weakly.

“I think we even saw his wife, or at least what goes for wife in his head”, he frowned darkly, and she saw the muscles of his jaw harden. “It’s Anthea”.

Kay’s mouth opened, and she reflexively put her hands in front of her face as tears streaked it in silent shock.

Zee nodded gravely.

“Yes, the broken angel, whom he enslaved, tortured and ordered to be repeatedly raped and then beaten until she miscarried, and then he fed her aborted fetuses to the dogs, and repeated the process until she was his willing slave, obedient, terrified and completely, irrecoverably insane. That’s the relationship he wanted to establish with a woman, and considering how she is bound to him, I think it’s the closest to her being his wife”.

Kay looked at him with red eyes wide open in horror, silently mouthing a word.

“Why? Because that’s who he is. People think I was joking or exaggerating when I described how much it shocked me to look inside his mind and truly know him. That’s what he truly is, in his heart of hearts. He’s someone who wants to have a wife so that he can have a broken, tortured, serially raped slave with a destroyed soul, who calls him ‘Master’ and pisses herself when he makes a sudden movement”.

“People are starting to treat his world as a legitimate place for spiritual evolution, a place where you go when you want to speed things up in your evolution, purposefully reincarnating there, sometimes with excellent results, but they don’t know who they are dealing with. He may be putting on an act in order to evade punishment. It may even be God’s will to allow him to do what he’s doing for a while because it serves a legitimate purpose. However…”, he shrugged, looking his wife straight in the eyes.

“Others should know”, she managed to use words finally. “They should know what monster they are dealing with”.

“Lord Shiva knows”, Zee nodded. “I think he got it when the bastard tried to buy Berfrid’s soul by starving his family to death, so that he could tear it apart and use it as bait to destroy more souls; I never saw him that angry, not even when he killed people. I think he, too, is keeping that knowledge to himself, because there’s no point in alarming people. When I see how you took it, I wonder if I should have told you anything at all. We would just traumatise them, and they wouldn’t do anything differently anyway. But I wanted you to know what I think because you’re my wife and I have no secrets with you”, he managed a smile.

“Thank you. It’s horrible beyond measure, but thank you for telling me”, she nodded. “I needed to know, so that when Father tears him to pieces as he promised, not a single thought of compassion would go through my mind”.

He hugged her and kissed her hair. “Let’s go comfort and teach people”.