Damascus

"The mission was to get us both out of there alive, and I would do whatever was necessary to achieve the goal. I had to make you believe I had left you, so that your reactions would be what Hassan was expecting. I was actually pushing him to make you watch us: that would have gotten the three of us by ourselves, and I could have ended it then. When his goon was gone, I had my chance and I took it without a second thought." She sighed deeply.

"Mark, I'm so very sorry you had to see and feel all of this. I could do it, get through this, because of my training. You don't have that training, and you must be devastated. Please don't hate me. Please understand that I love you, and I would do anything to save you: and today, I did."

"Wow," was all I managed to say. "Wow..."

She slumped a little, and asked, "please just hold me, okay?"

"Yeah," I replied absentmindedly and just did, without thinking about it. It felt good, but my mind was somewhere else. I understood her motivation. The memories still hurt, but on a rational level I got that she did the right thing. But the big problem was, I had a dangerous wife. A wife that was so far superior in every way that it was hard to fathom. How would I deal with the fact that I was the weaker one in our relationship? Did I need to start worrying about domestic violence in the future?

How was I supposed to deal with the fact that she hid her whole past from me? That she had once been a cold-blooded killer? That she had hidden her wealth from me?

"Anna, who are you?"

She thought a moment, then straightened up and looked me in the eye. "I'm the woman you rescued, to whom you gave the chance to rejoin the human race. I'm the woman you loved, when she wasn't even sure she had a soul. I'm the woman who will fight to the death for you, and for what you stand for: all the decent honesty and common kindness that jerks like Hassan can't even understand. And I'm the woman who will love you, and only you, until her last breath."

She sat straight in her chair, shoulders square, speaking from the depths of her heart, as if she were reciting a creed for which she was ready to die. She obviously meant every word, but it had looked to me like she meant every word she said to Hassan, too. Of course, she wasn't blowing my head off like she did his.

"I know you're hurting from what happened today, and you'll hurt more as you recover from the shock and things become clearer to you. The fact that I didn't intend for it to happen, and that I'm truly sorry it did, probably doesn't help you much: I did it, and you saw it. If that's too much for you to overcome, I'll be heartbroken, but I'll understand. I've been trying to figure out what I would do in your place, and I don't know." She gazed at me, tenderly and somewhat wistfully.

"Mark, I'm not going to ask if you love me, or if we're going to be okay. It's too soon for that, and I'm not sure I have the right to, anyway. Can we please just go home? Together? If you want space, I'll give it to you. If you want to talk, I'll answer anything you ask; from now on there will be no secrets. I just want us to be home. I want to be just an ordinary person again. Can we please do that?"

I thought for a moment. Anna was right, we had to get out of this shit hole Damascus. We were both pretty broken right now, in spite of how strong she'd looked at the bank. I wanted to be home, too. I nodded.

"Thank you." Anna croaked out the words as she knelt beside me, resting her head on my knee.

"Anna?"

"Yeah?"

"How do you see our future?"

"Ideally? You spank my ass for being a coward and keeping my past from you, you understand what I had to do to save you, you manage to forget what you had to see in there. You..."

"How?"

"I don´t know. I´m not a psychologist. I... I just hope you´re going to find the strength to do it."

"You´re right, you´re really a lot stronger than I am. It scares me a bit, you know?"

"It shouldn't. You are what I live for."

I really was a bit ashamed. She was so much stronger, she did everything for me, all the strength required from me was to accept what she had done for me and to get over it. I felt like a whiny brat compared to her. I had no idea how a man could forget memories like that either, but I made up my mind at least to try.

"I will try, Anna. I´ll try to do that for you."

"To do what?"

"Everything you´ve said."

"What? You really want to spank my ass," she mocked-indignantly asked.

"Who wouldn't?" I had to laugh and I knew that we were going to have a chance. It would be hard, but there was no other way. I couldn´t live without her and it seemed she couldn´t live without me as well. But our lives were about to change, that much was clear.

////

tl;dr

Married couple travels to Damascus, gets taken hostage during a bank robbery, other hostages are killed one by one, wife starts a fake relationship with the chief villain in order to be able to have an advantage when the chance arises to save herself and her hubby, she kills the bad guy cold-bloodedly, saving them both, but also revealing that she loves her hubby but has been a highly-trained killer in the past.