Chapter 5 - EVELYN WAS PART OF THE FAMILY
Evelyn laughed.
It was not amusement.
It was disbelief leaving her body in the wrong form.
“No.”
Sofia tried to explain.
Thomas Foster had been born Tommaso Vitelli in 1962.
He left Sicily as a teenager.
Changed his surname after becoming a U.S. citizen.
Cut contact with most of the family.
Antonio sat completely still.
“What relation?”
Sofia said she did not know.
Dr. Leone’s files did.
Marco located old immigration records.
Tommaso Vitelli’s father was named Salvatore.
Antonio’s grandfather had an older brother by that name.
Which meant Evelyn’s father had been Antonio’s father’s first cousin.
Not close family.
But family.
Evelyn walked to the window.
“My father repaired elevators.”
Antonio said nothing.
“He hated violence. He hated gambling. He wouldn’t even let me watch gangster movies.”
“That may explain why he changed his name.”
She turned.
“Don’t romanticize him into your world.”
“I’m not.”
Then Marco found something worse.
Thomas Foster had not merely left the Vitelli family.
Before disappearing from Sicily, he had witnessed a murder connected to Antonio’s grandfather’s generation.
He later gave information to American authorities.
The case never went forward.
But someone in the Vitelli family had remembered.
“So I’m being targeted for something my father did forty years ago?”
Antonio shook his head.
“Not likely.”
“Why not?”
“Because if revenge were the goal, they would not wait until you were on my aircraft.”
He was right.
Evelyn hated that.
Sofia sent a photograph from her father’s study.
An old medical file.
The patient name had been blacked out.
But handwritten across the top were initials.
T.F.
Thomas Foster.
Dr. Leone had treated Evelyn’s father twenty-eight years earlier.
The condition listed was hereditary.
A severe allergy to a rare antibiotic compound.
The same compound used to trigger Antonio’s reaction.
Evelyn stared.
“How would my father’s medical history help poison Antonio?”
Marco answered first.
“It wouldn’t.”
Antonio understood before she did.
“It helps frame you.”
Silence.
The substance was obscure.
Evelyn’s father had reacted to it.
Evelyn had access to Antonio in flight.
She had handled the medical kit.
If Antonio had died, investigators could be led toward her family medical history and claim she knew exactly what compound could cause the reaction.
Someone had positioned Evelyn to look like the perfect accidental suspect.
But that still left one question.
Why?
Antonio received the answer from New York.
The Vitelli board had begun an emergency succession vote.
Under the family trust, if Antonio died without children, control transferred first to Luca.
Unless Luca was implicated in Antonio’s death.
Then control moved to the next eligible blood relative.
Marco stared at the legal document.
Antonio read the clause twice.
Evelyn whispered, “Who is next?”
Marco looked at her.
Antonio did not.
Because he already knew.
Due to an obscure branch of the bloodline no one had updated in decades, the next living eligible relative was descended from Salvatore Vitelli.
Thomas Foster’s daughter.
May you like
Evelyn.
Someone had poisoned Antonio, framed Luca, and positioned Evelyn to inherit temporary legal control of assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
