Chapter Text
“Rome was not built in a day.”
An empire does not appear from scratch, a legacy does not plant itself, Frank knew that better than anyone.
Montréal blanketed in a sleet that tapped against the window like a thousand patient fingers. Frank sat alone at his desk, a cigar burning slow in the ashtray, the glow softening his face into shadows. In front of him, a spread of papers—old letters, copies of parish records, faded photographs he had paid too much to obtain from cousins who barely remembered his name.
The tree was ugly, but it was his.
The Tedesco name. His curse, his inheritance.
Frank traced the line with the end of his cigar, smoke trailing in the air.
The first marriage. The official one. Nonno Tedesco’s first wife, proper, pious, who had given him nothing but grief. She died in childbirth, taking a stillborn baby with her. But not before producing one surviving son—his father. The man who passed the name Tedesco to Frank, and to Goffredo after him, he had four other sons besides Frank and Goffredo, six boys in total but two never reached adulthood and the other two never reached puberty. Paolo Tedesco had only one son with his partner before being found dead, it took Frank years to find out about the lonely piano player and nightime entertainer with extravagant tastes.
It had all begun there, clean, respectable. But nothing stayed clean for long in the family.
The second marriage. That was where the cracks began. Another wife, another house, another attempt at legitimacy. She gave birth to Federico Tedesco who married to Andrea Bellastella thus becoming the father of Federico and Salvatore—Fede and Toti, the flamboyant brothers who would later discard the name in their own ways. But while Nonno posed for photographs with his second family, he kept a mistress on the side—a carpenter’s daughter. She bore him another son, the father of Sergio and Vannie. Frank did not worry about them at all, two carpenters, each blinded by either money, grief and shared stupidity.
Frank exhaled smoke and shook his head. Always two women at once. Always two lives.
And then, when the second marriage soured, Nonno sought pleasure in the arms of a prostitute. From that coupling came Lorenzo Mari the father of Claudio and Giovanni. Illegitimate, of course, not entitled to the name. Last thing he knew about Lorenzo is that he ran away with a patient of his leaving Claudio and Giovanni, the older brother was in college so a fourteen year old Giovanni took care of his mom.
Frank smirked bitterly. Sometimes the bastards turned out stronger.
Later still, when age should have tempered him, Nonno indulged in one last mistress, young enough to be his daughter. Frank stopped his research.
So what?
What if he had fathered half of Italy? What if the old poor bastard could not keep it in his pants?
That was none of Frank’s business and it did not helped his own.
He leaned back in his leather chair, let the scotch burn its way down his throat.
What mattered was this: of all those branches, of all those beds and wives and whores, only one man carried the name Tedesco now.
Goffredo.
The Patriarch of Venice. His brother.
Frank himself had shed the name at thirteen, when Pietro Patérno, his aunt’s husband signed the papers in Montréal, when Francesco Tedesco “died” and Frank Patérno was born. For survival. For reinvention. For power.
Fede had been forced to shed it when he came out, when his father spat him from the family. He became Federico Landi Porrini, and in the theatre he built himself a new stage name as carefully as Frank had built his empire.
Toti had kept his mother’s last name after the divorce, stripping away Tedesco as though it had never existed.
Claudio, Giovanni, Timoteo—bastards, grandchildrens of a common Italian whore never permitted the surname at all.
And Sergio and Vannei—the carpenters—Frank almost laughed. He barely counted them. Their blood was diluted with sawdust, their inheritance a hammer and nails. Hardworking, maybe. Honest, sometimes. But what were carpenters against dons and cardinals?
No. In the end, the name had narrowed to a single man.
Goffredo.
The boy whose birth had sent Frank away. The boy whose cassock had mocked him, whose rise in the Church was as merciless as Frank’s rise in the streets. They were mirrors, brothers who had devoured every other branch of the tree until only two remained.
Frank tapped ash into the tray and muttered to the empty room: “You kept the name, Goffredo. I kept everything else.”
The papers fluttered slightly in the draft from the window. The lines of ink and blood stretched across the desk like a map of sins.
Frank closed the folder at last, pressing it flat with his hand. He had no use for nostalgia. Family was leverage, nothing more. Names were tools, blood was currency.
And when the time came, he would spend it.
Vannie sat hunched over his whiskey, staring into the amber as though it might give him an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. His shoulders were heavy, the kind of weight that comes not from age alone but from disappointment.
Across from him, Sergio was grinning, leaning back on his chair like a man who didn’t understand gravity. His shirt collar was open, his hair messy in that half-studied way, and he was talking too loudly, as usual.
The older brother had learned to fear the younger’s invitations to go out, Sergio always needed something, a favor, a recommendation, a gig, a loan.
And he did, Vannie reluctantly offered to share a client, some renovation of a lavish villa at the outskirts of the city for a rich lawyer, the man was most likely not honorable but at least the payments came on time.
“You ever think about Nonnò?” Sergio asked suddenly, tapping his glass on the sticky table.
Vannie scowled. “No.”
“We only saw him once, remember? The old bastard sitting in the garden, wheezing like a donkey. I was what, six? You were ten? He gave us candy that tasted like cough medicine.”
“I said I don’t think about him,” Vannie muttered.
Sergio ignored him, eyes bright with mischief. “Our famous grandfather. All marriages and mistresses and saints-damned scandals. And what are we, eh? The grandsons of the other woman. The bastard branch.”
Vannie’s jaw tightened. “Watch your mouth.”
“No, no, hear me out.” Sergio leaned forward, lowering his voice but not his grin. “If our father André was the bastard son of a mistress, what does that make us?”
“Shut up, Sergio.”
Sergio raised his glass in a mock toast, unable to resist the punchline. “Why, it makes us the proud grandsons of a whore!”
Vannie stared at him, stone-faced, ready to growl. Sergio widened his grin, waiting. Then, against his will, Vannie’s lips twitched. A sound like a cough escaped him, then a grunt, and finally—laughter. Bitter, rough, but laughter all the same.
Sergio slapped the table in triumph. “Aha! I made the grumpy bastard laugh. Write it down, tonight’s a miracle.”
“Idiot,” Vannie said, shaking his head, but the laughter still lingered in his chest.
They drank in silence for a moment, the noise of the bar around them. Vanni thought of their father, André, the carpenter who had taught them to hold a plane steady, to measure twice and cut once. He had worked with hands scarred and stiff, never asked for more than a fair day’s wage, and never spoke of Nonno. Not once. To André, the name Tedesco was smoke. He built furniture, not dynasties.
That was the real inheritance—sawdust in their lungs, callouses on their palms. Not legacies, not titles. Just wood and work.
“We were lucky, you know,” Sergio said suddenly, staring into his beer. “We only saw him that one time. The old man. Nonno. We didn’t have to deal with the rest. Not like Goffredo, or Frank, or those other cousins. All those names and scandals. We got carpentry instead.”
“Lucky,” Vannie repeated, the word tasting bitter. He thought of his son, of Chiara, of the hollow that suicide had left in his house. Lucky was not a word that belonged to him.
Sergio didn’t notice. He was already on to the next story, some nonsense about a job gone wrong, a customer who had wanted a wardrobe but tried to pay him in lottery tickets.
Vannei listened with half an ear, sipping his whiskey. His brother was a fool, a cheater, a dreamer who believed his own lies. And yet, for all his exasperation, Vannie felt a strange kind of love. Maybe because Sergio was the only one who could still make him laugh about the one truth they shared: they were bastards. Sons of an illegitimate line, grandsons of a mistress.
The family tree might deny them, but the bar did not. Here, with whiskey and bad jokes, they were just two brothers trying to survive the weight of a name they didn’t even carry.
Vannie’s laughter died slowly, swallowed by the whiskey’s burn in his throat. As some younger crowd slapped their freshly emptied shot cups onto the counter the memories came back, the violence, the loud thud. Sergio was still grinning across the table, pleased with himself, but Vannie’s mind had drifted elsewhere, down into the sawdust and shadows of their childhood.
He could still smell it if he closed his eyes: the workshop. Old wood soaked with linseed oil, iron shavings, the sharp sting of turpentine. Their father’s world.
André stood at the bench, shoulders stooped, hands like split logs, planing a beam. Every stroke was a sentence, every mistake a crime. Vannie, twelve years old, had been there beside him, struggling to hold the tool steady. His wrist ached, his grip slipped, and the blade gouged too deep. A sliver of wood cracked away wrong.
André saw. He slammed his palm against the table so hard the chisels rattled, then grabbed Vannie’s hand. “Stupido!” he snarled, and brought the flat of the plane down across his knuckles. Once. Twice. Again until Vanni’s skin split and tears blurred the wood grain.
“You measure twice, cut once,” André growled, his breath sour with wine. “If you can’t remember that, you’re not a carpenter. You’re nothing.”
Vannie bit his lip until he tasted blood. He would not cry. He would not give the man that victory.
And then a small voice piped up at the door. “Papa?”
It was Sergio. Five years old, hair a wild mess, eyes big and innocent. He had toddled in holding a hammer far too heavy for him, grinning as though he’d found treasure. “Look what I found!”
The hammer slipped, clanged against the stone floor, nearly smashing his toes.
Vannie froze, waiting. Any second now André would roar, strike him, call him worthless.
But André only sighed. A deep, tired sigh that rattled his chest. He waved a hand as though shooing a fly. “Leave it. Not worth it.” He turned back to the beam, to his bitter work, to his silence.
Not worth it.
For Vannie, the correction, the beatings, the slaps, belts, whoopings, that was discipline, and discipline was love, it was how that poor devil, son of a mistress showed his love.
So when he refused to beat Sergio, something broke—inside of Vannie.
Sergio blinked, confused, then scampered off, humming tunelessly.
And Vannie clutching his bruised hand, understood something that day. His father had already given up on the younger one. Sergio would never be carved by discipline, never hammered into shape. He would be left to drift, soft, stupid, defenseless.
Never loved.
So Vannie took it on himself. Not with tenderness—he had none to give—but with a rough, silent shield. He would protect his little brother from the worst of their father’s bitterness. If André would not shape him, Vannie would at least keep him standing.
Even now, decades later, he still carried that instinct. Sergio, with his stupid jokes and lottery dreams, still needed someone to keep him from falling apart. And Vannie, grumpy old fool that he was, kept doing it.
“Why’re you looking at me like that?” Sergio asked suddenly, slurping the last of his beer.
“Like what?” Vanni grunted.
“Like I’m a lost puppy you dragged in from the rain.”
Vannie snorted. “Because you are.”
Sergio grinned, unfazed. “Then pour me another whiskey, big brother. Puppies get thirsty too.”
Vannie rolled his eyes, but he poured.
And for a little while, in the noise of the bar, the weight of the Tedesco name, of bastardy and bitterness, faded beneath the rough laughter of two brothers who had never asked for any of it.
Vannie knew.
He knew about the Tedesco name, he knew that the Patriarch of Venice shared his blood, so what? That could not benefit either of them in any way, and he feared what his stupid money-hungry fratellino would do with the information, so he swallowed his whiskey and looked up to the sky.
Sergio was already tipsy, stumbling, grinning at nothing. He could never walk straight—never had. Reminded Vannie of one of the very few beautiful memories he had of his childhood.
It was in a night like this, when dad had taken them to the bar not for their own safety but because he did not trust them around tools, even less now that Sergio was just learning how to walk…well…who was he kidding, the little devil would never actually know how to stand on his own feet.
André was on his second glass of whiskey as Vannie could not stand straight or sit comfortable from the last beating, Sergio was crying, he was hungry again, Vannie could not do anything but press the weeping bundle to his chest in hopes that his own tiny body could muffle the sounds and spare the infant of a beating.
He never had someone do that for him.
Vannie placed his infant brother on the floor…no…too cold.
He took off his own jacket in the midst of the chilling night to make a small mattress for his sibling, then went to the counter of the bar to look for…anything, scraps, half eaten snacks, maybe he could get another of the construction workers to spare half a sandwich.
His small stomach growled: empty, but he did not care, since mamá left that emptiness was there, he remembered as if it were yesterday.
Same alcohol smell, same iron taste, same uneasy feeling he had today, yesterday, his whole life as he could remember.
That day Vannie was also hungry so he had gone downstairs to get a snack before bed there was a pear on the table, his mom on the couch.
Mom was weak after breastfeeding, dad was drunk after going God knows where, she cried, he screamed, she curled, he threw, the second he sensed danger he bolted upstairs making his way to his parents’ room, the pear forgotten, his own needs were not so urgent where there was a baby (his brother) in danger (his father)
All he could do was run and take Sergio from his crib to hide him inside mom’s closet, ‘Yes, hide piccolo, hide while you can’ his tiny head thought.
The closet was uncharacteristically empty, no suitcase, no clothes, no shoes or lipstick, but he had no time to process that, when your brain is focused on survival, learning and processing information suddenly becomes unimportant.
More yelling, more crashing, more breaking, he could hear the fight so clear he could practically see it, even from upstairs.
But then came the blur, and the fog.
When the shouting ended, the pear was still there.
Mamá wasn’t.
The emptiness in his stomach wasn’t hunger anymore. Not really. Hunger had burned itself out long ago, leaving only a hollow pit where want had lived.
But Sergio—Sergio was always hungry. Milk, water, bread, anything. That night in the bar, Vanni stole a handful of tips from the counter and slipped them into his pocket. Not for himself. He would go buy milk, maybe. Or water, if nothing else. He would figure it out.
He managed to beg an apple off the barman instead. A single apple, spotted and bruised. He opened his tiny Swiss knife and carved it into clumsy little pieces, careful not to waste a drop. Then he went back to Sergio.
The baby was on the floor, stubbornly trying to stand. His legs were chubby but weak, wobbly as reeds. He looked ridiculous, a little drunk already on his own clumsiness. And for the first time in months, Vanni laughed.
Sergio laughed back, toothless and bright, as if he’d been waiting all this time to hear it.
Then it happened—just like that. One foot forward. Then the other. Sergio was walking. Towards him, of all places.
Vanni froze, apple slice in hand, his throat tight. For all the chaos, for all the emptiness, the first steps his brother ever took were to reach him.
That was a lifetime ago.
And now—tonight—here they were again. The same bar, the same smell of whiskey and smoke, the same wobbling steps. Sergio, tipsy, clumsy, weaving through the tables with that same stubborn grin, still trying to make his brother laugh.
“Infant Sergio was smarter,” Vanni muttered under his breath.
But when Sergio finally reached him, slamming his palm against the counter for balance, Vanni couldn’t help it. He laughed again. Just like before. And Sergio, idiot that he was, laughed back.
Two brothers, different roads. One bitter, one foolish. Both scarred by the same father, by the same emptiness. But no matter how far apart they had wandered, there was one thing that had never changed:
The first steps Sergio ever took were the ones leading him towards his brother.
Frank poured another measure of scotch, slow and deliberate. The amber liquid caught the lamplight and glowed like fire in a cathedral’s stained glass. He lifted the glass and turned it in his hand, as if he were inspecting communion wine before Mass.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he murmured again, almost with reverence. The words tasted heavy, older than his own blood.
No, it wasn’t. An empire required patience. Work. Brick by brick. Lie by lie. Betrayal upon betrayal, like mortar sealing the cracks. A thousand hands, a thousand sins.
That was the true inheritance of the Tedescos—not the name, not the Church robes, not the carpenter’s sawdust. It was the patience to build power from nothing, and the cruelty to keep it.
His eyes flicked back to the folder. Generations sprawled across those papers, scrawled notes about mothers and wives and whores. The official sons, the bastard sons, the forgotten sons. A family as crooked as the alleys he’d once ruled. And for what?
A name?
He barked a laugh. “A name is nothing.”
His cigar was nearly gone, its ember fading. He crushed it into the ashtray until it hissed, smoke curling upward like incense from a votive.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. He knew that. He had lived it. Montréal had been his foundation. The unions, the ports, the border routes—it took years of sleet and betrayal, of false smiles and broken bones. And he had not flinched.
Because he had learned young that family was not sanctuary. Family was scaffolding. Family was a structure you climbed while it was useful, then dismantled when it no longer held.
Frank leaned back in his leather chair, the old bones of it groaning under him. He closed his eyes and saw faces—his aunt Chiara’s worried frown, Pietro Patérno’s sly grin when he forged the papers, Fede’s flamboyant posture on a theatre stage, Toti’s manic laugh over a mountain of coke, Vanni’s scowl, Sergio’s clownish grin. Too many faces, too many half-siblings and cousins. A chorus of ghosts he had never asked for.
But only one face mattered.
Goffredo.
The Patriarch of Venice, haloed in incense, his cassock heavy with dignity, his mouth spitting sermons and doctrine. The boy who had stolen Frank’s place at their mother’s breast, whose very existence had exiled him to Canada.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And Goffredo’s beloved Mother Rome—the Church, the conclaves, the Vatican marble—was no different from Frank’s own empire of docks and ledgers and corpses. Both had been carved brick by brick. Both stood on the backs of nameless men.
The only difference was the uniform.
Frank drained his glass, the scotch burning clean down to his chest. He felt its fire settle into the hollow where nostalgia tried to live.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he repeated softly, a benediction and a curse. Then he added the part no one ever said aloud, the part Pietro had whispered to him once, long ago, in a smoke-choked bar in Montréal:
“But it burned in one.”
Frank set the glass down with a hard clink.
That was the truth. Empires took lifetimes to build, but only a moment’s weakness to fall. And Frank had no intention of letting his empire burn, not for Goffredo, not for the Tedescos, not for anyone.
He gathered the papers into a neat stack, tied them with twine, and slid them into the bottom drawer of his desk. Locked it. The past was not to be worshipped, only studied like an enemy.
Outside, the sleet fell harder, rattling against the window like a thousand skeletal fingers. The world was cold and patient, and so was he.
Frank lit another cigar, the flame briefly illuminating his face before shadows swallowed it again. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, watching it curl like a phantom city rising.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it could be destroyed in one.
And Frank Patérno intended to decide the hour.