He was a dead man walking. If anyone found the evidence and connected it to him, he'd be done for. But that was the least of his fears. They wouldn't find the evidence now that it'd been chopped up and deposited into different parts of different bodies of water throughout the state.
His hands shook, though. Whether from fear of being caught or adrenaline, he didn't know. When he looked to his shaking hands he saw the blood. Blinking a few times, the blood disappeared. Of course there wasn't blood. He'd washed his hands in the river. Nonetheless, he scrubbed at his hands until his skin peeled off in the bathroom of a convenience store.
He pulled up to the Baptist church, the stark white building shining in the Southern sun. He sat in the safety of his Cadillac, watching the young families pulling their children by the hand into the building. With a sigh he grabbed his cane, making his way into the church. Inside, he scanned the pews for the curly blonde shade of hair that he knew came from a box. He missed her brown hair.
He spotted her, the angel that she was, in a white dress. He slid into sit next to her. Her blue eyes held a question in them. Did you dispose of the evidence? He subtly nodded his head, noticing when she visibly relaxed. They were right on schedule. Noticing his still shaking hands, she grabbed onto them, engulfing his hands in her smaller warm ones. She sat as close to him as possible, going so far as to rest her head on his shoulder as if they were in the back row of a movie theater rather than in the middle of a church.
Neither of them listened to the sermon; they never did. They only showed up at church to make appearances. People who go to church every Sunday are less likely to get noticed when they commit crimes right and left. Hiding in plain sight was part of the plan.
Soon they will leave. They timed everything perfectly. When they put their house on the market they knew it would be sold in time for them to flee town after committing their biggest crime. The 'sold' sign has been in front of their house for a week; nobody would think anything strange about them leaving at the same time as people notice that Greene is missing.
Once they leave, they're never coming back. When they moved here, Zelena Greene had led them to believe that she would let them go free soon. For years they'd both done her dirty work. Neither of them willingly helped the redhead, but Zelena had her ways of forcing desperate souls to work for her.
When Zelena sent them both to rob a bank in Chicago, Belle and Gold found themselves drawn to eachother. Zelena quickly noticed how well they worked together, so she hooked them up with an apartment in Chicago to do more of her dirty work there together. She set them up with fake identities and fake wedding rings. She continued to move them often; not wanting her best two criminals getting caught. When she told them she was moving them to a small town in Alabama, she promised she would only ask one more favor of them before they could lead normal lives. She lied. She kept them in the same pattern of being criminals on the run. Zelena continued to use them for her illegal pursuits, pushing them farther than they were strictly comfortable. After two years living in the town as Lacey and Mr. French, she asked them to kill an innocent for money. That was when they realized she would never let them go. It wasn't the first time she'd asked one of her dancing monkeys to murder an innocent citizen, and Belle and Gold knew it wouldn't be the last. So on the night they were meant to kill a rich aging woman, they instead killed Zelena. It had been easy.
Knowing the murder she told them to commit would cause chaos in town, Zelena had been kind enough to accommodate for them to start a new life in a small town in Maine. In a few hours they would pack up what already hadn't been sent on the moving truck and they would drive across the country.
Zelena wouldn't follow them this time.
Throughout the whole church service he kept thinking about the feeling of the blood on his hands from last night. He could never manage to think of good or even decent things while in church. Every week the two of them sat in the parish, feeling like their crimes were branded on their skin. No preacher could save their souls from damnation.
During a particularly long prayer he slipped into the bathroom to scrub at his hands some more. Zelena wasn't his first kill, but it was the first time he knew who he was killing. He'd looked her in the eyes many times. He wouldn't have met Belle if he'd never had the displeasure of knowing Zelena. His reflection looked about ten years older than he really was. His eyes looked almost as dead as the body he cut into pieces and disposed of in the water.
At the end of the service they went back to their house, hoping to catch some sleep on the couch they would leave behind before leaving town forever. Despite spending the whole night covering up a murder, neither of them could catch a minute of sleep.
Somehow his hand ended up under the skirt of her white dress, caressing her thighs. What started as innocent caresses ended up in him bringing her off with his talented fingers, and then again with his tongue. They decided they wouldn't be able to sleep, so they stood up from the couch, their church clothes now wrinkled.
They weren't new to being on the run, but they were new to settling down. The car ride would be long, but in the end they'd be able to finally live normal lives. As he drove she rested one hand on his thigh, the other holding a novel open in her lap. He had no doubts that once they put all this behind them, she would move onto somebody else such as a younger man without a criminal record. When the time came he would let her go; she deserved much more than him. But he couldn't help but fantasize about a life in Storybrooke, Maine where they were together, and the wedding rings on their fingers weren't fake.