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Chapter One: No One Waits for Me
"Sometimes, time doesn't throw you out of the house... it throws you out of people's hearts first."
His name was Naz.
Only he knew that the name wasn't a gift... but an ancient curse, like a seal of pain that never fades.
He didn't choose this life, nor did he ask to be born into a house that would be forgotten three days after its owner died.
His father was unlike other men…
He laughed with his heart, and wiped the sadness from his son's face like the wind clearing dust off a windowpane.
But time has no love for kind men. The father died young, leaving Naz alone in the arms of a mother who didn't know she was dying on the inside too.
A few years passed. Then a strange man entered their home — a husband in name, but not in love.
That man… he wasn't just a husband. He was a judge, and Naz was the accused — born at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
Then the mother died...
Silently, mysteriously, without tears or questions.
No one asked, "How did she die? Why?"
Three days later, Naz stood on the doorstep like an unwelcome guest.
The man looked at him coldly and said:
> "This isn't your house… not anymore."
Farah, his sister from the mother's side, didn't speak.
She looked at him, and her eyes said everything — but her lips said nothing.
And silence… silence was betrayal — worse than exile.
Naz walked out carrying a wound on his face that would never heal, and a blind eye that saw more than sight ever could.
He was only eleven years old.
He went to live with his aunt, who raised him…
But he never forgot the road that led back to the house.
Nor the eyes that once looked at him like he was a roach in a plate of food.
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Now, twenty-five years later...
He came back.
A man of thirty-six, with a body of lean muscle and features carved deep into memory.
His face was split with a long scar down one side, and one of his eyes — ghost-white — saw nothing… but warned everything.
His head was shaved down to the skin.
His presence felt like the silence before a storm.
He reached the neighborhood at night.
No light except from an old streetlamp, its cable swinging like a noose in the dark.
He stood beneath it.
Lit a cigarette. Leaned against the cold iron pole.
Inhaled deeply, and whispered:
> "Nothing's changed... even the walls are still lying."
He closed his eyes… and the memories bit into him.
His mother. His father. A child's laughter echoing off pavement… all of it returned.
Then his eyes opened.
His gaze fixed on a window on the second floor of the old house…
There was a shadow moving inside.
A voice inside him whispered:
> "There are no ghosts here… only secrets that walk on two legs."
The cigarette burned to its end.
And with it…
Naz's patience burned out too.
[To be continued...]