Page 27 of Furever Loyal
“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.
“Iknow 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, wealsoknow it seems silly that Canis would help me out if I was working for them, without taking a cut themselves. Italsoseems 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 notthatstupid.”
“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.”
