100% listen to Put It On Me by Matt Maeson or Bury me Face Down by Grandson when you read this chapter and you will cry. It's been a crazy journey but even the Goddess of War and the Son of Fire must face judgement day.
The noise around me deflected off my defiant face like a mirror reflecting the image before it. I didn't let the weight of the eyes around me affect my demeanour. Years ago I would have said I was untouchable, but now I knew there were three things that could touch me, and they were named Ashton, Azrael, and Anubis Naifeh.
Children were never part of Ashton and I's plan. After New York, we had taken a much-needed vacation Fuji before relocating to Andorra with new identities. Maybe it was stupid that we kept our names, but when we married a year later we wanted it to be our names together, not fake ones. I would never love Ashraf Naifeh just as Ashton would never love the Athena Zelin living in New York. We were different people now, and so we kept our bloodstained names and I adopted his last name.
We had truly turned over a new leaf. Our life of crime was no more, instead of becoming bakers with Ashton's superior cooking skills. In the mid-evil style country of Andorra, it was easy to reinvent ourselves considering the lack of infrastructure and abundance of small towns. Part of the reason we chose it was because it's lack of extradition with almost every country in the world. Once I found out I was pregnant at twenty-eight with a broken IUD, we bit the bullet and decided we had killed too many people to take our own child's life. If I was still active in my career, I would have easily chosen to terminate the pregnancy, but I couldn't now. My shoulders were already too burdened with my sins to add another one. So five months later my daughter Azrael was born.
The angel of death was fitting; she was one of my saving graces and one of the only pure things left in my life. It was in that first year that I learned my true love for Ashton Naifeh. He understood and empathized with my darkest moments. He never judged me and he would always be loyal to me. We would love each other until the day we died but only when I saw him being a loving father to our daughter under the gauze of a normal life did I know what our love truly was. To ordinary people love was something you could experience with multiple people, something that could be broken apart my reality. To Ashton and I, it was trusting each other with the lives we had so selfishly caught for, and believing that together we would protect the only innocent thing in our world.
It's easy to die for someone, but it's so much harder to kill for them and not regret it for even a second. Ashton and I had that. We would never let reality get in the way of us being together; we would destroy worlds for each other.
Our son, Anubis, son of Set and bringer of death, was born three years later. Not a day went by where Ashton and I did not think of the atrocities we committed or the lives we destroyed. That fueled our training because we had a family to protect. One day that same year my son was born, I was reminded exactly how important it was we kept our skills sharp. I stabbed a man to death in our bakery that night and dumped his body in the river. Later that week, Ashton shot a man dead in our bedroom. That's when we realized we could never outrun our past.
We would do anything to protect our children and that's why we had to send them away. I cried more than I ever had when I left the two half Palestinian children on their grandmother's doorstep in The Hauge under the gauze of night. There was a silver locket around my four-year-olds neck with a picture of her parents in their military uniforms. They would grow up one day and Ashton and I wanted them to think of us as noble even if it was a lie. We were disposable human beings but we could never put that on our children.
All of our fortunes were left in their names and their grandmother's. I had told the former Mrs. Naifeh she would never see Ashton and me again unless it was on the news and that was not a lie. I rung her doorbell and ran while my four years old cried out for me and my infant son slept. I watched Jen intently from up a tree. She opened the door almost instantly, kneeling down to Azrael without hesitation. My daughter spoke in Arabic because it was all she knew and Jen's eyes automatically shot up into the distance like she expected to see me. No one else would leave their Arabic speaking children on her doorstep.
