Page 86 of This Life of Mine

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 theweight 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. UntilThe Wraith.

The Wraithwas 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.