Daughter of Deep Silence

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Text copyright © 2015 by Carrie Ryan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ryan, Carrie.

Daughter of deep silence / Carrie Ryan.

pages cm

Summary: At fourteen, Frances survived a slaughter that claimed the lives of her parents and best friend, Libby, but she took on Libby’s identity and wealth while plotting revenge against the powerful Wells family and now, at age eighteen, is ready to destroy them, including her first love, Grey.

ISBN 978-0-698-14556-6

[1. Revenge—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Survival—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction. 6. Death—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.R9478Dau 2015

[Fic]—dc23   2014048067

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents.

For two amazing friends without whom this book wouldn’t exist:

Diana Peterfreund for being my inspiration, guru, constant confidant, and unerring supporter

&

Ally Carter for listening to my wild idea, saying, “Yes, write that!” and never letting me waver.

Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.
—VITTORIO ALFIERI

W
hen they pull me onto the yacht, I can’t even stand I’ve been adrift in the ocean so long. A young crewman sits me on a teak bench while he calls out for someone to bring him blankets and water. He asks me my name but my tongue is too thick and my throat too raw from screaming and salt water to answer.

I’m alive
, I think to myself. The words run on an endless loop through my head as if with repetition I’ll somehow believe it.
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

And Libby isn’t
.

I should be feeling something more. But it’s all too much too fast. Inside I’m awash with numbness that cocoons a brightly burning knot of rage and despair. Protecting me. For now.

A pair of crewmen pull Libby’s body from the life raft, rolling her onto her back on the yacht’s gleaming deck. I think about how birds have hollow bones and how easy it must be to break them.

That’s how she looks right now: hollow. Her cheeks sunken, her wrists twigs wrapped in tight skin that’s turned to leather from relentless heat and exposure.

A crewman presses his fingers against her neck, a palm in the center of her chest. His expression slides from desperate hope into a mask of efficient resignation. He looks up to where an older man with a ring of white hair around his otherwise bald head hovers, waiting. The crewman shakes his head.

The older man lets out a cry, his face crumpling as he falls to his knees by Libby’s side. He only says one word over and over again as he pushes a tangle of wet hair out of her face:
no
. His voice cracks and his shoulders slump, shaking, as he sobs.

If I had any tears left in me I’d be crying too, but I’m so dehydrated that all I can do is shake, my lungs spasming with hiccups. I try to talk, my mouth forming a
wh
– sound over and over again.

“Shh.” The crewman who rescued me drapes a blanket around my shoulders. “It’s okay, you’re safe now.”

I want to believe him. But all I can do is stare at Libby’s body. An hour earlier, and they’d have found her alive. She might have survived. Seven days adrift in the middle of the ocean, and she’d lost it in the last hour.

It doesn’t seem fair. We were supposed to make it together. We’d promised.

Her body is so light and brittle it takes only one person to carry her inside the ship. The older man does it, clutching her against his chest, his eyes red and lips pressed tight together.

“
My baby
,” he whispers against her temple. Understanding hits with a physical force: This is Libby’s father. He glances at me as he passes, his expression bewildered, and I know he’s wondering the same thing I’ve already been thinking: Why am I the one who survived? Why couldn’t it have been her pulled alive from the raft?

I want to apologize, but seeing him with Libby—a father cradling his broken daughter—I can’t. The unfairness of it is monstrous. I would give anything to have my father here now, to feel him holding me and protecting me the way Libby’s father does.

And he would give anything for his daughter to still be alive.

I close my eyes, unable to stand it. Because in this moment I truly understand just how alone I am. How no one will ever again hold me and care about me the way Libby’s father does her. My parents are dead. Libby is dead. I have no relatives—no other family waiting for me.

I am alone. Utterly and irrevocably alone.

Memories storm through me, fast and sharp, in an unrelenting strobe of sensations—sounds, smells, fragments of sentences. I feel my mother’s hand against my forehead checking for a fever some night, years ago. I hear the way she sneezes, big and loud, and my father laughing in response the way he always, always does.

There’s the smell of the car on the winter morning we go to pick out a Christmas tree, my father singing along to the carols on the radio with his voice always just slightly out of tune. I taste french fries—my fingers slick with fast-food grease—my mom’s treat to me as she drives me home from summer camp.

I lick my lips and gag at the taste of salt. The memories come faster, running over one another, drowning me. Panic claws its way up my throat. My nails are soft and cracked from so long in the water and they split past the quick as I try to dig them into the skin along my thighs, wishing I could gouge it all out of me. The memories. The loss. The pain. The refrain that’s been unspooling in my head for days:
gone, gone, they’re all gone, your life is gone
.

And inevitably, images from the attack come next: the gun pressed to my father’s head. The blood drenching my mother’s shirt. She’d begged, but it hadn’t mattered. It didn’t matter for anyone on that cruise ship. They’d all been massacred.

Three hundred twenty-seven
. That was the total number of passengers and crew on the
Persephone
. It was one of the things we’d learned during the safety drill before leaving port. In the end, it never mattered how many people a life raft could hold. It never mattered where each cabin’s muster station was.

Nothing we learned during the safety drill mattered.

The attack had come swift and hard in the middle of the night. One minute life on the
Persephone
was normal, the next the ship was rocked with explosions. The attackers blocked the exits while armed men went room to room, systematic in their assault. Faces passive, expressions detached from their actions, they’d pulled triggers and reloaded magazines with sickening efficiency.

Killing them all.

The bodies. Oh God, the bodies. And the blood and the screams and the smell of it all, like overripe peaches stuffed with pennies.

I gasp and shudder. It was only luck that allowed Libby and me to escape. We talked about it relentlessly during those next seven days adrift, the impossibility that we’d somehow survived.

All of that and she’d ended up dead anyway. It’s so brutally unfair.

The young crewman pushes a plastic bottle of water into my hand, forcing me back into the present. My throat clenches. The bottle’s cold—freezing against my palm—and there’s condensation dripping along the outside. I fumble to open it, my fingers useless, my muscles too weak to even lift it. Finally he takes mercy and twists the cap free.

“Drink slow,” he says, but in my world there’s no such thing and I press that bottle hard to my lips. If I’d died the instant that water rushed across my tongue I wouldn’t have cared. I’m sharply aware of each drop as it cascades down my throat and into my hollow belly. Nothing exists then but that taste—that sensation.

“Easy now,” the man says, gently prying the bottle from my lips. “You don’t want to make yourself sick.” He’s too late; already my stomach revolts in painful cramps. I turn and vomit.

The man rubs my back as I heave, telling me again that I’ll be okay. That I’m safe. “What’s your name?” he asks when I’ve recovered enough to sit up again.

I press the back of my hand to my mouth. My skin tastes like salt, making me retch. “Frances,” I try to tell him, the sound nothing more than a tattered thread.

The storm that had been threatening at the edge of the sky all day finally breaks, sending fat drops of water crashing to the deck. “Let’s get you inside,” the crewman says as he slides his arms gently under my shoulders, lifting me as easily as Libby’s father lifted her. As he carries me, I tilt my head back, letting the rain wash across my sun-cured skin.

If it had come a few hours sooner, this rain would have saved her.

I barely pay attention as the man maneuvers me through a large salon, down a flight of stairs, and along a hallway to a stateroom. He sets me carefully on the bed.

“I’m a medic,” he explains. He pulls over a large red bag emblazoned with a white cross and slides on gloves. “Is it okay if I examine you?”

I nod and he’s ginger as he probes at the sores covering my legs and back, unable to hide his horror at what’s become of my body. “You’ll be okay,” he tells me again, but I get the impression it’s more to convince himself than me. He unzips his bag and begins pulling out various medical supplies.

“You’re severely dehydrated,” he explains as he runs an alcohol-soaked swab across my inner arm and presses a needle against the flesh. “So the first priority is to start getting fluids in you.” It takes him several tries, his forehead creased in frustrated concentration as he searches for a vein. I feel none of it.

Eventually he’s satisfied and drapes an IV bag from a hook on the wall. “For now, just rest.” He starts for the door but I force the sound up my throat.

“How many survived the attack?”

He looks at me, not understanding the question. “Attack?”

“The attack on the
Persephone
,” I croak in a salt-crusted voice. “How many others survived?”

Frowning, he opens his mouth, reconsiders, and closes it. Finally he says, “Two others: Senator Wells and his son.”

I don’t even dare to breathe. “
Grey?
” I whisper.

He nods and I slump back into the nest of pillows, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes. Grey’s alive.
Grey’s alive!
It seems so impossible, that after losing everything else, this one small part survived. Like suddenly there’s a bright spark of hope in the cavernous blackness my life has become.

“Hey, I’m Grey,” he says, standing next to my deck chair, casting me in shadow. I have to squint when I look up at him and though I’ve been ogling him all afternoon I still can’t stop my eyes from dropping to his chest, skimming down to the strip of bare skin just above the waistband of his swim trunks.

They skim low on his hips, almost like a promise.

I’m fairly certain he notices and my cheeks heat. But I know the reason he’s here—what he’s really after. He’s made that abundantly clear.

“Her name’s Libby,” I tell him, gesturing to where Libby’s hanging out over by the towel stand. She has her elbows propped on the counter and is leaning forward slightly, hoping to catch the hot attendant’s attention. “I’d move quick if I were you,” I add.

“Oh, um.” He shifts from one foot to the other, and I assume he’s nervous because he can’t figure out how to politely ditch me to go after my friend. But I’m already expecting it—I’ve noticed him looking our way for a while now.

“Do you mind if I join you?” He points at Libby’s empty chaise next to mine. It’s so unexpected, I stare at him perhaps a beat too long. Finally I realize he’s waiting for my response and I shrug.

He’s barely settled before I ask, “So, what do you want to know about her?”

He smiles and ducks his head. “Actually,” he says, “I was hoping to learn more about you.”

While on the raft, I’d daydreamed of Grey rescuing me, even though I knew it was impossible—that he must have been killed with everyone else on board. Over and over as we drifted toward death on the empty ocean, I’d imagined him coming for me.

It didn’t matter than I’d known him barely a week, it had been long enough to fall for him with an intensity I’d never experienced before.

He was my first love. And he’d told me I was his.

He’s alive
.

In the black horror of what my life has become, that single point of light now shines. I’ve lost my parents. I’ve lost Libby. Nothing will ever be the same again. I have no other family, no long-lost relatives to take me in. There is nothing left.

But Grey. I still have Grey.

I cling to the thought as though it is a life raft, knowing that if I hold on tight enough and don’t give up, I’ll somehow be able to survive.

I drift asleep imagining our reunion. Already feeling his arms around my shoulders, his hands pressing against my back, holding me tight against him. He’ll brush his lips against my temple and whisper over and over that it’s okay, he’ll keep me safe, and I’ll believe him.

Because he also saw the horror. He also survived it. He also
understands
. In the protection of his arms finally,
finally
, my tears will come again.

The same four words cycle endlessly through me, giving me comfort for the first time since that opening shot was fired on the
Persephone
:
I am not alone. I am not alone. I am not alone
.