Deceived

by Heather Sunseri

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Heather Sunseri

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  chapter twenty-seven

  chapter twenty-eight

  chapter twenty-nine

  chapter thirty

  chapter thirty-one

  chapter thirty-two

  chapter thirty-three

  chapter thirty-four

  chapter thirty-five

  chapter thirty-six

  chapter thirty-seven

  chapter thirty-eight

  Also by Heather Sunseri

  About the Author

  DECEIVED

  Mindspeak Series #5

  Heather Sunseri

  DECEIVED

  Heather Sunseri

  http://heathersunseri.com

  Copyright © 2016 Heather Sunseri

  eBook Edition

  Sun Publishing

  Edited by David Gatewood

  Cover by Mike Sunseri

  This work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or article.

  To @JennyTheGolden.

  You are with me every day that I write.

  You’re the first to hear every frustration and joy.

  Writer’s best friend.

  Also by Heather Sunseri

  The Mindspeak Series

  Mindspeak

  Mindsurge

  Mindsiege

  Tracked

  Deceived

  The Emerge Series

  Emerge

  Uprising

  Renaissance

  “The Meeting” (An Emerge short story)

  Subscribe to Heather’s newsletter to hear immediately when new stories are released and to receive free stories and giveaways.

  chapter one

  Briana

  He was closing in. I darted left behind a tight grouping of banana trees.

  The high-pitched squawks of the seagulls, disturbed from their gathering spot just beyond the tree line, told me he was gaining on me. But I couldn’t find his mind in my mental search for nearby humans.

  He’d been hunting me for ten minutes. Blood pulsed loudly between my ears.

  I felt him poke at the edge of my brain, trying to break in. If he did get through, the hunt would be over. I pushed hard against his thoughts, shutting him out.

  “Come on, Red,” he sang. I hated it when he called me “Red.” “I know you’re close. I can feel it.” There was a roguish chuckle behind his words.

  I wiped at my brow and took off in a sprint, farther into the trees. Sand and debris seeped into my worn-out boat shoes. Twigs poked at the soft skin in the arches of my feet.

  Waves slammed against the shore in the distance. At any other moment that sound would have soothed my mind, calmed the thoughts racing one after the other, each vying for top position. But now, the crashing waves only distracted me.

  I tried again to find his mind. If I could just find his before he found mine, I could alter what he was seeing. I’d yet to master the art of invisibility, but I could make him think he was seeing someone or something else—a wild boar, I thought, then laughed at the idea.

  I weaved through trees and attempted to circle back around, hoping I could come up behind him, catch him off guard. I knew there was no escape, only victory or defeat.

  I tried to keep my footsteps light. My calves burned from running on sand. My entire body was tense with fear of being caught.

  A coconut fell from a tree, landing several feet in front of me. It was all the distraction he needed. He slipped inside my mind. Gotcha. Stop where you are. Keep your hands at your sides.

  I cringed and let my eyes close as his voice slipped through my thoughts like silk and took hold. I tried and failed to push him back out. Victory was his. He had complete control of me.

  “Don’t turn around.” Behind me, his voice was smooth, even. He slipped his arms around me, pinning me where I stood. His breath was hot on my neck. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Looks like you won.” I tried to sound bored, like his victory meant nothing.

  He smiled against my skin, then kissed me just below my ear lobe, causing my stomach to do a little flip. As I felt his mind release its hold on mine, I slipped inside his. My lips lifted just slightly at the corners as I forced him to imagine he had his arms around one of the lab workers I’d seen earlier that day—a large, bearded man. Not Jonas’s type at all, I mused.

  When he nuzzled my neck this time, his lips met with prickly hair and the taste of salt from a man sweating in the island sun. He jumped back. “What the…”

  I spun around, laughing.

  “Uncool,” he said, swiping his arm across his lips.

  “Serves you right. I warned you I was getting stronger at using my special skills.”

  “That you did.” He crossed his arms while leaning against a palm tree. His eyes traveled over me, and I squirmed under the scrutiny. “Who’s been helping you back in Kentucky?”

  I shrugged. “Seth, a little. But mostly I’ve been practicing on my own.”

  “That’s not enough. Jack or Lexi should have worked with you more by now.”

  “They’ve been busy. They have an entire boarding school of clones who are just discovering they have these special powers. And they’re working on finding more.” I balanced on one foot while emptying the sand from my shoes. “I want you to help me. Train me the way you did Lexi.” I continued to mess with my shoes, avoiding eye contact.

  “Bree, you have to understand…”

  I straightened. Met his gaze. “Understand what?” I studied his face, the tight line of his lips. Gone was the playfulness of our cat and mouse game.

  “Look. We’ll talk. But you haven’t even been here long. Head down to the boat dock. I need to check a couple of things back in the lab, then I’ll join you. We’ll spend the afternoon talking.”

  “Talking,” I repeated. Jonas wasn’t one for just talking. I had been dismissed.

  “Among other things.” He wiggled his brows. He altered his personality so often that at this point I was getting whiplash. A contagious smile spread across his face and reached all the way to his eyes. And that’s when I realized he was trying to distract me with the Jonas I knew last year—the Jonas who wanted to play games, make out, and pretend we were still hormonal teenagers with no worries. He stepped closer to me. “I’ll be there sho
rtly. I’ll get us some bottles of water. Go. Enjoy the tropical island.”

  And just like that, he turned and marched off toward the labs, leaving me wondering if I’d imagined any sort of relationship ever existing between us.

  ~~~~~

  Thirty minutes later, I was lying on a padded bench. A floppy sunhat perfectly shielded my face from the harsh tropical sun.

  “Briana!” Jonas sang. “Where are you?”

  Would you stop it with that racket? I’m right where you told me to go. I sat up and turned my head toward the beach, where a suntanned Jonas was walking toward me. On board your new toy.

  He chuckled inside my head. Racket, huh? He trekked through the sand in a pair of extremely worn flip-flops. When he stood on the dock beside the sailboat, he smiled again. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”

  I gnawed on my lower lip. Despite having gotten to know him extremely well last year, I couldn’t calm the fluttering of nerves in my stomach. It didn’t help that I was currently wearing nothing but a string bikini and an oversized hat. Or that he drank me in like a giant tropical smoothie when he saw me.

  I gestured with my hand. “It’s your float, not mine.” My words came out a little harsher than I intended.

  “Float? It’s a twenty-seven-foot sailing vessel. I’d say it deserves a slightly higher classification than float. Though you do seem to be using it for that very purpose.” He stepped aboard, causing the vessel to rock a bit. He handed me a bottle of water while grabbing a railing to steady himself. His dark tattoo peeked out from beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt. “You’ve gotten some sun.”

  I did have a pink tint to my arms, even though I’d slathered on copious amounts of sunscreen every day since I’d arrived, hoping to prevent a sunburn on my pale, freckled skin. I peered out into the open sea. “It’s beautiful here. A person could hide out here forever.”

  “Is that what you’re doing? Hiding out?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And what you mean is: a person could go crazy here.”

  I angled my head toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re on a tiny atoll in the middle of the north Pacific. We’re cut off from the rest of the world.”

  “If you don’t like it here, then why did you agree to stay?”

  He lifted my legs, sat on the bench, and then let my legs rest against his own, leaving one hand on my thigh. It seemed innocent enough, and I tried not to read anything into it. We’d gotten closer last fall, but then Lexi had discovered Sandra creating and growing cloned humans inside incubators on this island and we’d all gotten distracted hunting her down. And when Jonas then agreed to stay here and clean up his surrogate mother’s evil mistakes, our long-distance relationship had fizzled.

  Yet here I was, on his little atoll in the middle of the ocean, hoping to rekindle something we started months ago.

  “It’s not that I don’t like it here,” he said. “But it’s lonely. There’s nothing to do here but work.” He lazily drew circles on my thigh.

  I studied his profile. He seemed troubled, distracted. He studied the open water that stretched out from the island and seemed to get lost in the vastness of it. “What are we doing, Jonas?”

  When I’d arrived several days ago, he’d treated me like I was nothing more than a casual acquaintance who had taken him up on an offer to visit his paradise and catch some tropical rays. We played on the beach some. I sunned while he worked. But we barely conversed beyond small talk.

  Now, he didn’t bother to act surprised by my question or pretend he didn’t know what I meant. I was probably more surprised by the directness of it than he was. “Can you be more specific?” he finally asked.

  “You’ve barely touched me since I got here.” I had been shocked when he grabbed me after our earlier game. It was the most intimate we had been since I’d arrived. “If you’re so lonely and bored, I would have thought you would’ve been more excited to spend time with me.” Instead, I’d spent most of my time so far by myself on the beach.

  He turned. His amber eyes burned into mine before he blinked away a brief display of desire—the same desire I had witnessed when I first arrived on the chartered plane. But it had been nothing but mixed messages ever since then. “Bree, our lives have gotten so much more complicated.”

  “Complicated?” I laughed. “My life is about as uncomplicated as it’s ever been. I’ve graduated high school. I haven’t made a decision on college.”

  Or anything else, really. Oh, sure, things might have looked complicated on the surface. I was flat broke—except for my dad’s money, which came with more attached strings than I was willing to accept—and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. And if I didn’t decide soon, I’d be forced to follow whatever plan my dad had set for me. The last I heard from him, he was cutting off my accounts if I didn’t show up in Portland by month’s end.

  But the way I saw it, I could start this new chapter of my life with a clean slate. Without any help or direction from my parents. After all, my parents didn’t deserve to have any say in what I did with my life. They had kept from me the secret of my creation; I’d had to find out I was a cloned human from Lexi Matthews, of all people. It had hurt to hear the truth from her and not from the two parents who had told me they loved me again and again.

  “Why haven’t you made a decision about college? What’s stopping you?” Jonas asked.

  “I just don’t know if college is what I want. Not yet anyway. I thought I might take a year off and work first.”

  “Doing what?”

  I shrugged, ignoring his smug tone. “I don’t know.” Moving my legs off of his lap, I faced forward, away from him. “I thought maybe I could help you. Here on Palmyra.” Which was why I’d asked him to train me. Why was he making this so difficult?

  “Help me?” he asked, laughing.

  “Don’t be a jerk.” My blood heated at his condescending tone, though I wasn’t surprised by it. “You said so yourself. You’re lonely and cut off from the world here. You could teach me about the lab. I could help with the young clones who have been taken out of the incubators. Lexi says it’ll be years before they can be brought to Wellington. I can help with the school that’s been established here. I practically have a medical degree. And I’ve learned to use my own mind abilities. I can help. And you can teach me so much more.” I hated the desperation in my voice.

  “Bree… this is no life for you. We’re completely isolated here.”

  “How is it a life for you, then? What makes me any different?”

  Jonas’s fingers touched my cheek. He turned my face toward his. “Think about it—”

  “I have thought about it. I want to stay here.”

  “Jonas!” The sound of a male voice carried through the breeze. “Come! Come quick!”

  Jonas and I looked to a man at the end of the dock. He waved his hands and motioned frantically for Jonas to come.

  Jonas climbed onto the dock, and after helping me out of the boat, he took off in the direction of the main Palmyra buildings. When he turned back to me, I waved him on. Go ahead. I’ll catch up.

  I watched him sprint away, kicking sand up in his wake, and sighed. Convincing him that I could help him on Palmyra was going to be harder than I’d thought.

  chapter two

  Jonas

  “What happened?” I asked when I reached the medical wing and saw one of the workers carrying a small, tow-headed boy.

  “He just collapsed,” said Keoki, a teacher from the island’s school.

  Six or seven years old physically, he was one of the many clones created by Sandra in her clandestine factory. To think I’d once called that monster “Mom.”

  “Put him on the examination table,” ordered Dr. Sallee, the island’s best doctor. Here was a woman I’d initially thought was a devout follower of Sandra Whitmeyer’s evil ways. But she’d begged me to give her a chance, and I had. So far I had no regrets.

  Keoki, a young,
dark-skinned man from Hawaii who’d been on the island for the past couple of years, laid the boy on the table, and Dr. Sallee pulled back the kid’s eyelids. One, then the other, shining a light in each eye. She ran an instrument along each of his feet. Neither foot flinched.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Tamati,” Keoki answered.

  I brushed the boy’s hair off his forehead. His skin was burning up. I scanned the inside of his body. Neural activity fired through his brain and along his spinal cord, as it should. His heart was collecting and dispersing blood throughout his body, though slightly faster than usual. “I don’t see anything wrong,” I told the doctor. “Besides the fact that he’s burning up.”

  I had barely gotten the words out when Tamati began bucking against the table.

  “He’s seizing!” Dr. Sallee said. She pushed my hands against his shoulders. “Hold him down.” She ran to the foot of the exam table and lifted up the table itself. When the boy’s feet were elevated higher than his head, he calmed.

  “What do you think?” I asked. The doctor lowered the table, then proceeded to hook Tamati up to a heart rate monitor and several other machines.

  “Same as the last two: I just don’t know.”

  “Is he paralyzed?”

  “I’ll know more after some tests, and when—if—he wakes up.”

  I wanted to throw something. This was the third cloned child to collapse in this manner. And we had watched the first two die within a week of falling ill.

  “Jonas?” Bree said from the doorway. Under different circumstances, the fact that she had covered her bikini in a shirt, shorts, and pair of flip-flops would have disappointed me. “Is everything okay?”

  I looked to Dr. Sallee.

  “I’ll call you when I know something more,” she said, but there was no hope behind her words.

  I draped my arm across Bree’s shoulders and led her from the room.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “One of the clones.”