Page 3 of Furever Loyal
“Kincaid. Kvoss.”
“My Queen,” they replied instantly with reverent tones, Kincaid’s perhaps just a bit quicker and more sincere.
“I need you to return to Ursidae Manor. Both of you.”
The pair of shifters looked at each other in surprise. Kvoss being recalled wasn’t a surprise, however. He resided at the Manor, House Ursa’s seat of power, located in the northeastern United States.
Kincaid on the other hand hadn’t been recalled in nearly ten years. Not since he’d feuded with the King.
But the King is dead, killed in the uprising, and the Queen is in charge now. Perhaps things are changing.
“We’ll be there immediately,” he said.
“Good.” The phone line went dead.
Kincaid kept running as he slipped the phone back into his pocket, eager to get back to base. His mind was going insane, wondering why he was being recalled.
How fucked up were things, that she neededhishelp?
2
Haley sighed and dropped her head into her hands, rubbing at her eyes as she rested her elbows on the desk in front of her.
“We’ve been going at this for hours and haven’t found a damn thing,” Danielle complained.
Eyeing her employee, Haley smiled wearily. “I know. But this is our job. Until we’ve examined everyone’s accounts, we keep going. You heard the Queen, this is important.”
Danielle just exhaled heavily, a sigh of epic proportions. “It does pay the bills.”
She nodded. “Yes, and quite nicely as well.”
House Ursa was the sole client of the accounting firm, and a big enough client that Haley had five employees working with her, all of whom earned very generous salaries because of it.
She didn’t understand much about them. They were very reclusive about the exact nature of their company.And they use the most archaic terms imaginable! The President is a Queen?
“You would think ten million dollars would just sort of leap up off the page if it ended up in someone else’s account,” Danielle muttered, scrolling through another page on the computer next to Haley. “Not with these guys though.”
Haley held back a laugh. “No kidding.”
It was closer to finding a needle in a haystack than she cared to admit. The sheer number of dollars available to the literally thousands of employees the company had was…mind boggling. They were easily all among the top fraction of a percent of the wealthiest people in the country, but much of that wealth was spread across the world, in various shell companies, real estate, and plain old foreign banks.
Keeping track of it all was a year-round job for the office, and truthfully, Haley was considering bringing in another three pairs of hands to help lighten the load. In the past two years, things had been increasing almost as fast as they could keep up.
The others were at their desks doing the same thing, only Danielle had brought her laptop over to Haley’s desk to work alongside her. They weren’t friends, exactly, but she was the person Haley talked to the most in the office. Whatever that meant.
“Does Kaelyn even know if it was stolen by someone in the company?”
Kaelyn was the Queen, the head of House Ursa. Such an odd name for a company. It was more like the British monarchy than anything, completely and utterly out of place in the modern day. Haley wished they would modernize, but she not only liked the job, sheneededit. They were her only client and had been for years.
Whatever it was that was odd about them, she was determined to look the other way. Haley had access to their entire financial portfolio, seeing everything their money was spent on. Enough went out on things that she knew were more than they seemed, but she was convinced they weren’t evil. She wasn’t working for some sort of criminal organization, but they certainly preferred to stay in the shadows if possible.
“Hey…Haley?”
Danielle was staring at her screen, and her voice had been off. She’d found something, Haley knew it. Leaning over, she looked at the screen that had been pulled up.
Approximately two weeks earlier, something had happened with the company. She had no idea what, but Kaelyn had called her up, said that she had taken over from her husband, and then ordered the team to do a review of the main corporate account.
It hadn’t taken long to find that ten million dollars had been swiped from it by an unknown source. They’d tried to cover it up, but to an experienced eye it had been as plain as day to see. After locating it, Kaelyn—or the Queen—had asked them to review every single account to see if it showed up anywhere.
