High House Ursa: The Complete Bear Shifter Box Set

by Riley Storm

  Caught completely by surprise, Haley’s mouth worked several times silently before she found the words. “I wanted to go into politics originally,” she admitted.

  He waited a moment, but that was all she was going to give him, he realized.

  “I think you would have been good at it, from what little I’ve seen. You’re a natural speaker. Why did you stop?”

  She glared at him. “Bad choices.”

  Kincaid couldn’t help himself. He laughed out loud. “You would have been perfect then!”

  The glare grew darker. He definitely wasn’t going to be asking for that Christmas present now. Still, he knew a little bit more about his intriguing accountant. It was a shame she seemed convinced he was an ass and treated him as such. If she was a little bit less of a bitch, he realized, he might take her to bed.

  Those legs would look mighty nice without that skirt. Plus, I wouldn’t mind seeing what that top is trying so hard to conceal.

  She was quite attractive, and he suspected she would be even more so if she wasn’t always giving him dirty looks or calling him a traitor.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have any time to waste in pursuing her, a regret he truly did feel. Right now, his focus had to be on proving himself innocent, so he could reclaim his rightful spot within the house.

  Kincaid knew what he had to do. But despite all that, he still had exactly no idea how to go about it.

  13

  The silence in the room had grown deafening, but what really irritated her was that Kincaid not only seemed not to care, he didn’t even notice! The huge man—or shifter, as she wasn’t really sure what to call him now—had become distracted, speaking slowly to himself.

  “Hey, do you want to share your revelations with the rest of us?” she asked caustically. She might not be some ultra-powerful being who could change into a beast, but Haley wasn’t about to let herself be dismissed either. She had said she was in, and now she expected to be in.

  “I’m trying to figure out how to prove my innocence. We got sidetracked there, and truthfully, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to get back to that. Is that okay?”

  She grated her teeth together. “Of course. We wouldn’t want anyone to know how much of an ass you really are, now, would we?”

  “Honestly I’m a pretty likable guy,” Kincaid said jovially. “It’s not my fault you can’t see that.”

  “Pretty sure it’s precisely your fault,” she muttered under her breath. “I can’t believe I agreed to help you.”

  “Well, you did. So, help.”

  Not for the first time, she wished she had something heavy enough to hit him with. “How would you like me to do that? We already said we can’t hack everything. The office was a bust. What exactly does that leave us to work with?” She grinned fiendishly. “Or do we just go back to the Queen and tell her you’re guilty?”

  Kincaid’s visage cracked as a hostile glare made its way through, directed fully at her. Haley basked in it, enjoying it. She was finally starting to worm her way under his arrogant exterior, and it felt good to be able to repay him.

  “Well, let’s see what we do know.”

  “This oughta be good,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear.

  “We know I’m innocent.”

  “We?”

  He glared again.

  Two points for me.

  “I know I’m innocent. We know that ten million dollars went missing from the corporate account—we still don’t know how. We also know that ten million dollars were deposited into my account.”

  “Sounds right to me so far. And we also know all signs point to you.”

  Kincaid sighed. “Being petty doesn’t become you. You’re better than that. Start acting like it.”

  She looked away. He was right. She’d let him get the better of her, and now she was starting to act like him. Haley needed to stop trying to show him up. Let him be the asshole. You just be you.

  “Continue,” she said, not wanting to acknowledge the truth of his last comment.

  “Thank you. Now, we also know it seems silly that Canis would help me out if I was working for them, without taking a cut themselves. It also seems silly that they wouldn’t set up an account for me from their bank and simply deposit the money there.”

  “I guess.” She had to admit, that did make sense.

  “All in all, this makes it seem like Canis is trying to frame me. Or, at the very least, I’m a complete and utter idiot. Make all the comments you want, but I think you know by now that I’m not that stupid.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded, though she wasn’t happy about it. “But why frame you?”

  “That,” he said, snapping a finger and pointing it at her, “is a very good question. One I can’t answer. Yet.”

  “Did you do anything to piss them off?”

  He shook his head. “No. Until recently, I was away. In Europe. Had been for nearly a decade. Now, I was the top man over there, so I was known to Canis. But their head guy and I, we had sort of a mutual truce between us. We never had any real run-ins with them besides the odd bar-brawl. Nothing serious.”

  “Nothing that would cause someone to have a grudge against you.”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge.”

  “Why were you away in Europe?”

  Kincaid frowned. “I…had a difference of opinion with the King.”

  She felt her eyebrows lift a fraction of an inch. “There’s a King now too?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “He was…relieved of his duties when all this trouble went down.”

  Haley knew he wasn’t telling the entire truth. She suspected that whatever had happened to the King, it was a bit more permanent than Kincaid was letting on, likely because he wanted to protect her from the truth. She was starting to get the impression that violence was second nature to these shapeshifters. Even death, killing, they didn’t seem to act like it was a big deal.

  She remembered Kincaid mentioning earlier that they might kill him for what he’d done, and that hadn’t seemed to surprise him at all. In fact, he’d acted like it was almost routine.

  “Wouldn’t that make you out to be more of a traitor though?” she asked. “If you disagreed with a royal who is now gone, I mean? You wanted him out.”

  Kincaid shook his head. “I just wanted to modernize the House some. To bring some of our traditions into the modern age. I didn’t hate him. He was a good King.” Kincaid smiled at some memory or another. “Even his wife wanted to make the changes.”

  “Kaelyn,” she said, without even thinking about it.

  “Yes. Our new Queen,” he answered.

  “Right. Back on track though. All of this, the money and stuff, it went down during the time of the troubles.”

  “What exactly were these troubles?” she asked, unable to stay silent about it any longer. “Both you and the Queen told me about them, but all she told me after that, was to shut down the accounts of a list of names and fold them into the main corporate account. Nothing else.”

  Kincaid looked away, clearly thinking his words over before he spoke. “A faction tried to take over. It was a…hostile...takeover attempt.” He glanced down. “It didn’t work, but it came close.”

  She absorbed that information, carefully not pointing out that it sounded very much like there had been an attempt to kill the people in power. If there was one thing she’d learned about working with House Ursa over the years, though, it was to not ask questions about things she didn’t need to know about. Now she had some idea of what was going on in there, she understood that even more.

  “Well, there’s something I don’t understand,” she said, factoring in all this new knowledge, and the way this world seemed to operate.

  “What’s that?”

  “If they wanted you out of the way, why the hell wouldn’t they just kill you instead? Wouldn’t that be easier, if killing is something you—what did you say, shifters?—if it’s something you shifters are comfortable with.” />
  “Holy shit.” Kincaid slapped a palm against his forehead. “You’re right!”

  “I am? I mean, of course, I am! But why are you acting so surprised about it?”

  “Because for one, I didn’t expect you to be right.” Kincaid was running his hand over his head now, messing up his steely gray hair.

  “Ass.”

  “But the second reason, is I think they already did!”

  Haley was thoroughly confused now. “They did what, Kincaid?”

  “Kill me. Or try to I mean. Someone did try to kill me. Just before you came to the House. I thought it was just him not liking me or being a little crazy but…” He fell silent, deep in thought.

  This time, she let him think without interrupting. Obviously, he was onto something, and she wanted him to figure it out. Maybe they could find another lead out of it.

  “We need to look up the bank records of someone else in the House,” he said, looking up suddenly. “You can do that, right?”

  “The ones that are tied to the accounts I have access to, yes, of course. Why? And who?”

  “You also have a list somewhere, of the companies associated with Canis, right? That you can cross-reference if you need to. For reasons exactly like this?”

  “Yes.” She did have such a list, though she didn’t use it often. Despite their stated dislike for one another, the Houses did enough business together that sorting through it all would be a nightmare. But she had it, just in case.

  “Okay, I need you to cross reference the records with the list of transactions on the bank account.”

  Haley shook her head. “I can’t do that, Kincaid. That’s not what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be helping you.”

  Kincaid’s face hardened. “You can, and you will if you want to remain neutral in this. You’re not altering anything Haley. Just looking them up, that’s all.”

  She wanted to fight, but he was right. “Fine, but why this man?”

  “A hunch,” was all he said.

  “Okay. What’s his name?” She sat down at her desk and opened her files.

  “Krawll. Krawll Ursa.”

  14

  “It’ll take me a few minutes.”

  “Take all the time you need,” he said, watching the screen as she worked.

  Haley stopped, turning her body so she could look up at him. She was pretty. He’d known that of course, it had been one of his first thoughts of her when she’d walked into the Throne Room, on a day that felt like ages ago.

  Was it really just yesterday?

  She had eyes that seemed to catch every detail, big and round, yet filled with a fierce intelligence he knew he was only scratching the surface of. The lips that so often were fixed with irritation toward him were infinitely kissable. Thick, round, tinged with just a little bit of red, a faint lipstick, designed to accentuate, not stand out.

  “What I meant was, could you please not stare over my shoulder?” She gestured at the chairs. “Have a seat, I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  He flashed her a smile. A real one, not one of his fakes. This was her area of expertise, and he owed it to her to let her prove it. “Sorry.”

  Kincaid had any number of other things he should have been thinking about. Yet he was fixed on her, for all the wrong reasons.

  “Krawll,” she said, spelling it out. “That one?”

  “Yes. You find him?”

  “Pulling up his transactions. Now the real work begins.”

  It had to be him. During the fight, Krawll had been far too aggressive. The location and strength behind the attempts to strike Kincaid had been meant to kill. He’d been trying to figure out why the man would want him dead so badly, or if that was just the way Krawll was, and he’d not had an answer.

  The appearance of Haley and her bombshell accusation had changed all his thinking, and until she’d suggested that Canis should just kill him, he hadn’t thought of it again.

  Now he knew that he was on the right track. They were going to find something in those files. He could feel it. Feeling jittery and anxious, it was tough to sit still in the chair while Haley worked. He wanted to jump up, to pace back and forth. What was the link between Krawll and House Canis? How did that affect him?

  That was the biggest mystery of all. The bank transfer had occurred before he’d even been nominated for the position of Hunter. He’d barely been back in North America when it happened. How could anyone have known to go after him? There was something still missing, a piece of the puzzle, and a critical one. What the hell had he done to warrant such attention from House Canis?

  “Kincaid.”

  He snapped out of his thoughts. “What did you find? Is it a link? We should go interrogate him, see what he knows.”

  Shaking her head, Haley pointed at the screen. “I cross-ran the file against both credits and debit transactions, to see if he’d taken or given money to any of the places on the list.”

  “And?”

  “It came up empty. This guy is fine.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I refuse to believe that.”

  “I know, but I’m telling you, I didn’t mess up. None of the companies on the list are ones he dealt with.”

  “Fuck.” Kincaid wanted to throw his chair in frustration. “What about—what about any larger transactions? Ones that might stand out?”

  Haley sighed.

  “Please?” he asked, putting on his best charming face. “I know this might seem silly to you, but this is my life we’re talking about. I promise I’m not the asshole you think I am. Mostly. Someone did this to me.” He got up and walked to the edge of her desk, staring at her the whole time, not letting her eyes go.

  “I need your help, Haley. This is your area of expertise. Not mine.” He smiled as he complimented her, wondering if she’d accept the flattery, or call him out for trying to flirt his way to victory. It didn’t matter, as long as it worked.

  “Okay,” she said, going back to her screens.

  It was in there somewhere, he knew it. They just had to find it. Kincaid just didn’t know what “it” was. He longed to look at the list, but he suspected that was against the rules—rules he needed to follow if he was to keep her on his side for now.

  Seconds stretched into minutes, and he started pacing, despite his best efforts not to. Haley didn’t say anything, lost in the numbers. The longer she kept at it, the more hopeless he felt. He was barking up the wrong tree. Maybe Krawll was just a dick. He wasn’t the only one in Ursa who could wear that label.

  He was about to tell Haley not to waste any more time, but before he could, she stiffened.

  “You found something?” he asked quietly, leaning over the desk. “Didn’t you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Despite her earlier command, he couldn’t help himself. He had to see it with his own eyes. Coming around the desk, he leaned over her shoulder, doing his best to ignore the scent of honey and milk coming from her hair.

  “Show me,” he said gruffly, trying to take command of himself once more, keep his persona intact.

  “It’s right there on the screen,” she said with just a bit of bite to her words, pointing at three separate boxes all containing the same information, with one difference: the time stamp. All three were dated two days earlier. The day before his trial against Krawll.

  “A million dollars.” He tried not to sound disappointed but failed. “You know the scale of the funds we have access to, Haley. A million dollars isn’t exactly much.”

  “You told me to look for large sums that might seem unusual. This is three separate transactions, all deposits into his account, for a clean, even, million dollars each. I’m telling you, as the one who runs the books for you guys, this is odd.”

  Kincaid looked at the sums again. He’d been hoping for more. Much more. Still, if she said it was weird… “What’s so off about them?”

  She sighed, using the mouse icon in circles over the name of the company depositin
g the money. “A million dollars. Three times. From a restaurant? One that he’s never had contact with before? Never bought food at, or invested in? Nothing?”

  “A restaurant?” he echoed. “You’re right, that is odd. We have no record of this place, do we? Nothing on the files?”

  “No.”

  Kincaid grinned. “We might just have found a new one to add. Which is perfect.”

  “How is that perfect?” Haley sounded confused.

  “Because I’m starving. Come on, we’re going to get lunch.” He walked back around the desk, smiling eagerly to himself. They were back on the hunt! It was time to go search for clues.

  “That’s your plan?” she asked, staring at him in astonishment.

  Kincaid waggled a finger at her, putting just a bit of extra flair into it so that she knew he was mocking her. “Hey, there is absolutely nothing rule-breaking about going to get food from a restaurant. That was your condition. I didn’t say breaking in. I said getting food.”

  Haley didn’t look overly impressed. He was playing by her rules, even if it probably wasn’t how she’d expected to go about it, and so there was little she could do about it. Either she admitted that, or she would suck it up and come along. Kincaid didn’t care much which one she chose.

  A handful of seconds later, she stood up. “Fine. I don’t know why we’re doing this though.”

  “Tactics,” he explained as she grabbed her coat and put on her outdoor boots.

  “Tactics?”

  “Yes. Think about it. This is an entirely different avenue of attack than what we’ve done so far. Whoever is after me, they’re expecting me to go down. The incident at the docks? They probably hoped I wouldn’t be allowed to go searching, but they had to have planned for it. Now they think I’m stuck, and that I’m running out of time.”

  “You are running out of time,” she pointed out, leaning back against the elevator wall as they descended to the ground floor.

  Kincaid glowered. “Thank you for the unnecessary reminder. Still, the last thing they expect is for me to show up at this restaurant, something they don’t think I even know about. We’re going to throw them off balance. Push them into doing something unexpected, and we’ll see what we flush out by doing that.”