26. Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Alex
Istop at Sprouts, and move through the aisles with more purpose than I’ve had in a long time.
Chicken thighs. Bone-in. Skin on. Italian sausage. Hot and sweet because balance matters. Garlic. Lots of it. Cherry peppers packed in oil. White wine-dry. Fresh rosemary, parsley, and lemons.
I don’t second-guess any of it. My hands anticipate what to grasp before my mind does.
Chicken Scarpariello.
It’s the dish my mother made when she wanted everyone at the table. Loud and bright. Comforting. A little aggressive in flavor, unapologetic in heat.
She used to say it was peasant food dressed up.
I haven’t made it in years.
Back in Queens, our kitchen was small but always alive. My mother cooking in a dress, music playing low, windows cracked even in winter because something was always frying or simmering.
I learned by watching, by being handed a spoon and told to taste, and being told I was wrong and to taste again.
The memory makes me smile.
“Il cibo è memoria,“ diceva sempre. “Se lo fai in fretta, dimentichi da dove vieni.” she used to say in Italian. “Food is memory. If you rush it, you forget where you come from.”
Down the line, I gave up cooking.
Jobs don’t allow it. You eat on the run. Protein bars. Takeout. Whatever keeps you moving. Meals become fuel, not ritual. Kitchens become places you pass through, not places you stay.
Tonight is different.
Back at my rental, I set the ingredients out on the counter, lining them up without thinking. It offers a sense of stability. Like laying out tools before a job. Only this one doesn’t involve weapons or chains. It involves care.
I think of Lina. Bruised and battered, stubborn enough to go to the gym, brave enough to ask me to dinner. How she remains unaware of the complete extent of the peril surrounding her.
This dish isn’t flashy. It’s not impressive for the sake of it. It’s honest.
I wash my hands and begin rinsing vegetables in preparation for tonight. The smells are already pulling me backward in time. My mother correcting my knife grip—telling me to slow down.
I haven’t made this since becoming Alex Lombardi. Before disappearing wasn’t a choice—it was a necessity.
Cooking it tonight will be like reclaiming something I believed I’d buried along with the rest of my past. A reminder that, before everything changed, I came from a kitchen where food meant love, and love meant showing up.
I’ll be there with her tonight, not as a protector, nor as a shadow. Only as a man offering something real.
As I pull out the garlic and lemon, the smell opens a door I usually keep locked.
In an instant, I’m back in Queens. Only it isn’t the kitchen anymore. It’s fluorescent lights. A stainless steel table. My mother’s body laid out too neatly, like someone tried to give her dignity after stealing everything else. Cold and still.
My beautiful and loving mother was raped and murdered by a rival crew my father had crossed. They weren’t after her. She was just the price they chose to make him pay. A message written in blood, meant for him.
He never showed up to receive it. He didn’t even come to the funeral.
The money and visits stopped long before that. Quietly. Like a faucet turned off without explanation. My mother never said his name out loud after that. Only worked harder. Took extra shifts a the hospital. Smiled less.
We eventually lost the house my father had paid for—the one she adored, because for a little while, it made her believe she was someone special.
We ended up moving into a place that smelled like mildew and resignation.
I helped where I could. School during the day. Anything I could pick up after. She worked two jobs and came home exhausted, smaller somehow.
Grief hollowed her out piece by piece until she was more memory than woman.
My mother loved my father fully—foolishly. He was her one true love, and she never pretended otherwise. She believed in him with a devotion that blinded her to the cost of being seen beside a man like him.
He lived in Italy, bound to a family name that carried power and blood in equal measure. The woman he married there was not chosen for love, she was chosen for stability, alliances, and optics. A business decision wrapped in silk and ceremony.
They had a son together. Nico Moretti. We were aware of each other early on. There was no grand reveal, no dramatic confrontation. Two young men growing up acknowledging one another, each symbolizing an alternate existence, a life that could have been ours if circumstances had changed.
At first, we hated each other on principle. Two sons circling the same absent man, both convinced the other was the favored one. The legitimate heir. The acknowledged legacy and the mistake that got to stay. But time inevitably exposes lies.
When my father came to visit Queens, Nico came with him. He always had two dark-haired boys trailing behind him, a man who filled every room he entered and left emptiness in his wake the second he walked out.
When we were together—we realized how similar we were. Same instincts. Same dry humor. Same distrust of the man who kept promising presence and delivering absence. Two boys raised by women who had loved the same man and paid for it in different currencies.
We became inseparable in those stolen pockets of time. We trained together. Fought together. Snuck out together. Got into trouble together.
When our father wasn’t watching, we were brothers—running rooftops, testing limits, daring each other to jump higher, hit harder, and move faster.
We learned early how to read rooms, how to spot threats, how to disappear when necessary. Survival skills disguised as games.
But Nico understood the family business in a way I never wanted to. He listened when our grandfather spoke. Asked questions. Learned names, alliances, and debts. He carried the weight of expectation with a kind of quiet resignation. I pushed back against it at every turn.
When our grandfather died, Nico became the heir. The next Moretti in line. I was so fucking relieved.
I never wanted it. Not the money. Not the power. Not the violence dressed up as tradition and honor.
Especially not after my mother was taken because of it. Her death made everything painfully clear. This life didn’t protect the people you loved. It consumed them. Used them as leverage—collateral.
Nico stepped into the role because someone had to. I walked away because I refused to be next.
And for a long time, that choice didn’t divide us. If anything, it bound us together. Two brothers standing at opposite ends of the same legacy, each believing the other was doing what was necessary.
What I’m starting to suspect now—is how much that distance may have changed him. And how much of a mistake it might be to assume the boy I grew up with is still the man standing in his father’s shadow today.
But it doesn’t matter anymore. I erased Alessandro Moretti and became someone else. Someone with no inheritance, no surname worth killing for. Someone who could decide what kind of man he would become instead of letting his past decide for him.
I don’t pretend I’m a good man. But I choose my targets carefully. People who leave destruction behind them. People who hurt the vulnerable and hide behind systems that failed to stop them. Rapists. Murderers. Child molesters and traffickers.
People my mother never had protection from. The kind who treated innocence as collateral damage and left families to bury what they destroyed.
I wipe my palms on a towel and breathe through the memory.
I didn’t save her. But I learned from her.
I learned what happens when good people are left to suffer while everyone else looks away. I learned how easily fear silences witnesses. How often monsters thrive because no one is willing to stand between them and their victims.
When my mother needed someone, no one came. Not the neighbors who heard the shouting. Not the system that was supposed to protect her. And not me.
For years, I carried that guilt like a stone in my chest. Heavy—permanent. A debt I could never repay. Until The Wraith.
The Wraith was born from that guilt. From the belief that if I couldn’t save her, maybe I could save someone else. Maybe I can be the person who showed up. The person who stepped in. The person who refused to look away.
I know I can’t save everyone. I learned that lesson a long time ago. But every time I stop someone from becoming another victim, every time I stand between a predator and the person they’ve chosen to hurt, it feels like honoring her.
Maybe that’s why keeping Lina alive has become more than a contract. More than a case. Somewhere along the way, the line blurred, and now the thought of failing her feels uncomfortably familiar.
She’s the principal. That’s all she should be.
I should be thinking about why her name is at the top of a contract to kill—not wondering what makes her laugh after a hard day, or whether she’d smile if she came home to dinner already waiting on the table.
But Lina makes me want things I never allowed myself to want. She makes me believe I could give her more than stolen moments and borrowed time.
As I dry the produce and pack it away for later this evening, I make a quiet note to myself.
If, by some miracle, Lina wants more than tonight—if she wants something lasting, not a fling—I’ll do more of this.
The unglamorous things. The grocery shopping. Cooking dinner. Folding laundry while she loses herself in a book. Making coffee before she’s awake. Quiet acts of love no one applauds because they’re never meant to be seen.
I’ll take whatever weight I can from her shoulders and give her back the moments life keeps trying to steal.