I tried the same combination that had opened the box as a passcode. Fifteen.
Eleven. Thirty-two.
“I’m in,” I said. I clicked through the icons on the phone one by one.
The photo roll was empty. The weather app was set to local weather. There were no notes, no text messages, no locations saved in the map function.
Under the clock app, I found a timer counting down.
12 HOURS, 45 MIN, 11 SEC…
I looked up at the others, feeling each tick of the timer in the pit of my stomach. Eve said what I was thinking. “What happens when it hits zero?”
My stomach clenching, I thought of Toby, of what I hadn’t found in this box. Jameson stepped in front of me, green eyes steady on mine. “Forget the timer for now, Heiress. Go back to the main screen.”
I did and, fury building, checked out the rest of the phone. There was no music loaded onto it. The internet browser’s home screen was a search engine—nothing special there. I clicked on the calendar. There was an event set to begin on Tuesday at six in the morning. When the timer hits zero, I realized.
All the calendar entry said was Niv. I turned the phone so the others could read it.
“Niv?” Xander said, wrinkling his forehead. “A name, maybe? Or the last two letters could be a roman numeral.”
“N-four.” Grayson took out his own phone and executed a search. “The first two things that come up when I search the letter and the numeral are a federal form and a drug called phentermine hydrochloride—an appetite suppressant, apparently.”
I rolled that over in my mind but couldn’t make sense of it. “What kind of federal form?”
“A financial one,” Eve replied, reading over Grayson’s shoulder.
“Securities and Exchange Commission. It looks like it might have something to do with investment companies?”
Investment. There could be something there.
“What else?” Nash threw the words out. “There’s always something else.”
This wasn’t a Hawthorne game, not exactly, but the tricks were the same. I clicked on the icon for email, but that just brought up a prompt with instructions for setting up that function. Finally, I navigated to the phone’s call log. Empty. I clicked over to voicemail messages. None. One more click took me to the phone’s contacts.
There was exactly one number stored on this phone. The name it was stored under was CALL ME.
I sucked in a breath.
“Let me do it,” Jameson said. “I can’t protect you from everything, Heiress, but I can protect you from this.”
Jameson wasn’t the Hawthorne I usually associated with protection.
“No,” I told him. The package had been sent to me. I couldn’t let anyone do this for me—not even him. I hit Call before anyone could stop me and set it to speakerphone. My lungs refused to breathe until the second someone picked up.
“Avery Kylie Grambs.” The voice that answered was male, deep and smooth with an intonation that sounded almost aristocratic.
“Who is this?” I asked, the words coming out tight.
“You can call me Luke.”
Luke. The name reverberated through my mind. The person on the other end of the line didn’t sound particularly young, but it was impossible to place his age. All I knew was that I’d never spoken to him before. If I had, I would have recognized that voice.
“Where’s Toby?” I demanded. In response, I received only a chuckle.
“What do you want?” No answer. “At least tell me that you still have him.”