Mary was happy.
She realized it when she woke up one day in her flat, their flat, and heard John in the bathroom grooming his mustache. It was a horrid thing, looked like a caterpillar, but he enjoyed having it. He thought it made him look distinguished. It made her laugh. John made her laugh. He was the funniest person that she had ever met, although most people never heard his jokes. They weren't for everyone. They were sarcastic statements said under his breath in passing, or like last night, said with a grin as he lay between her legs. She had never thought sex was funny before, but it was with John, and she blushed to think of it.

She blushed.

Her face actually flushed red to think of how he made her feel. How long had it been since that had happened to her?

She looked up at the ceiling. The gun was still hidden behind the tiles over the bed in case she needed it, but would she need it? It seemed to be true that Moriarty was no more. Someone was destroying his old network, probably as a prelude to starting their own, and so she had kept her head down. No one knew of her new identity as Mary Morstan. No one had known but Moriarty, and if he was dead, then she truly was free. Free to have this life. Free to keep this man who was humming as he admired his well-groomed face-worm in the mirror. She smiled and rolled herself to a sitting position.

Someone might still find her, if they looked closely. Her credentials had been faked, but she knew her job now. Not hard to learn a bit of anatomy, a few terms here and there. God knows she'd seen enough injuries in her lifetime, having caused more than a few of them herself. And her language skills had taught her enough to help her learn the Latin names.

John also helped, once you got him past the fits of stuttering that he went into when a certain consulting detective was brought up. Once he had relaxed, perhaps with a bit of brandy or scotch in his belly, he'd tell tales that would curdle a young girl's blood, of car chases and cannibals, gunshot wounds, and people who'd taken incurable poisons who didn't yet know that they were dead. He talked of his former commander losing all of his men and suffering horrible facial deformities. He talked of sewing people shut after their limbs had been blown off by bombs. She found it all interesting. Somehow he never noticed how strange it was that she liked his stories, but then his last companion had been Sherlock Holmes, so perhaps he had no basis for comparison.

She needed deeper cover. Some place, some role where no one would suspect her of ever being anything other than good, little Mary Morstan. When John walked into the room and smiled at her with that silly thing over his nose, she started to laugh, and he started to laugh too before walking forward and shutting her mouth up with a kiss.

As he started kissing down the length of her neck, she decided. The best thing for her would be to become Mrs Mary Watson. No one would ever suspect the wife of this man of being anything other than normal. How could she be evil, and be married to John Watson who was always exactly who he seemed to be. Well, that wasn't quite true. If you looked shallowly, he didn't seem to be dangerous at all.

But she knew better. She knew that if John found out who she was, and who she had been hired to kill, she might not live through the day. She knew that he had the skill to break her neck. John placed one hand on her shoulder and moved his mouth over her right breast. If he squeezed his hand just so, he could snap her neck and she would die right here, right now. She felt a stab of fear that surprisingly turned into desire. She jerked her hips, and he raised his head to look into her face questioningly. Then that dark smile descended on his face and his hand wormed slowly down her body.

He was talented, John Watson was, with both his hand and his mouth, and despite her experience, she had never been with a man who was so attentive to her own pleasure. When he touched her, she forgot everything else for a while.

When she opened her eyes again, to find herself naked with strong arms wrapped around her and fuzzy mustache hairs tickling her shoulder, she knew that she wouldn't wait another day to start her plan. She would drag him into jewelry shops. She would find an excuse to buy wedding magazines. She would use whatever tricks that she could imagine to make him think that the idea was his own, and when he proposed marriage to her, she would be pleased and surprised.

The next week she baked a set of heart shaped dessert breads with dinner, then she showed him the article where she had found the recipe. It just happened to be in a wedding magazine.
"The recipes are excellent, I might even get a subscription. What do you think? Did you like them?"
"I... yes, the bread is very good."
"Great. I'll sign up tomorrow."

She was waiting in line at the Tesco when a thin man in dark glasses bumped into her, causing her to drop her things. He apologized and helped her put them back in the shopping bag, only to rush away. When the girl rang up her purchases, she pushed a post card over to her. "Is this yours?" she asked.
"No I don't..." Mary started, then she looked closely at it. "Yes, It must have fallen out of my purse."
When she got outside the store, she walked around the corner into the shadow of the building and pulled the card out to read again.

The picture was one of Hong Kong, where she had done her last kill. The post card read.

Dear A.G.R.A.
Congratulations on your new boyfriend. He sounds so sweet.

Won't he be surprised when he sees the family photos!

Speak to you soon.

Yours
C.A.M.

She looked for a postmark, but their was none. The handwriting was scratchy. The image was the hotel where the Swedish diplomat had stayed. She'd climbed in through a twenty-story window. Killed the man, and left down the fire stairs. It was a flawless kill with no witnesses. Who else had known that she had done it?

She looked around for the man with the glasses. How tall had he been? What did he look like? She hadn't noticed. She was off her game. Someone knew who she was. Someone was threatening to take her John away. She headed for the bus, scanning all around her for the man or any other suspicious people. She tore the post card into little pieces and deposited them into two separate trash cans to prevent it from being reassembled.

Who was C.A.M. ?

There were ways to find things out if one was willing to pay, but she had to be careful. She had to find out who was watching her. Tonight, she would make up an excuse to go out, and she'd find someone who could tell her what she wanted to know. She had a disguise or two stashed for emergencies, and money from her last job. Money enough to get access to people who could search the records. She can't have been the first one to be blackmailed by this person. One way or another, she would find this C. A. M. and kill him before he could say anything that would ruin her well earned fairy-tale ending.