Chapter VI:
Fifteen years had passed—not as mere numbers on a calendar, but as jagged scars carved deep into Hiba's body and soul. Her ex-husband, Khaled, had spent that long stretch behind prison bars. Some might hope that iron grates soften brutality, yet for Khaled, prison had been no more than a cold vault for his malice, a place where hatred fermented into a poison more lethal than any venom. Outside, Hiba performed her daily miracle: gathering the shattered fragments of her life and forging them into a protective shield for her children.
Mona, her daughter, had grown into a breathtaking young woman. She bore Hiba's wide, sorrowful eyes, yet her heart remained pure and untouched by the soot of their tragic neighborhood. When Mona became engaged to a kind-hearted young man, a fragile flicker of impossible joy appeared on the horizon. Her white wedding dress hung in the wardrobe, glimmering like a lighthouse in the midst of a dark, stormy sea. But at that delicate moment, the prison gates groaned open, and the wolf was released once more.
Blinded by the purity of her heart, Mona believed in the old saying that blood never turns to water. She longed to enter her husband's home carrying her father's blessing, as if trying to mend the holes that had shredded her childhood. She visited his new apartment—a place suffused with the stench of cheap cigarettes and manufactured regret. Khaled met her with a performance worthy of an Oscar, weeping hollow, bitter tears. He clutched her hands, claiming he was a changed man, starved for the embrace of the daughter he had abandoned.
"Stay with me, my daughter," he pleaded, his voice dripping with a venomous sweetness carefully measured. "Just one month. Let me prepare you for your wedding with my own money. Let me compensate you for the years of orphanhood you suffered while I still drew breath." Led by the tragic instinct to forgive, Mona agreed. She imagined herself a heroine of redemption; she did not realize she had walked straight into a trap scripted for a massacre.
As the first days passed, the paint began to peel from the walls, and the mask slipped from Khaled's face. Mona discovered that prison had not been a school of penitence, but a training ground for crime. The apartment became a true den of depravity. Women of the night drifted through shadows, and addicts shared their poisons freely with her father. Hysterical laughter and guttural screams tore through the night's fragile silence. Mona would retreat into her room, clutching a small prayer mat, praying for the month to end.
But the true horror lay not in the strangers, but in her father's closet. One night, while Khaled lay drowned in an alcohol stupor, Mona crept out to retrieve her confiscated phone. Opening the wardrobe, she found items that froze the blood in her veins: heavy iron chains, canisters of gasoline, and old yellowed photos of her mother, Hiba, defaced with knife marks. Later that night, she heard him muttering into a phone, voice slurred by drugs:
"I will burn her... I will make her a lesson for the whole neighborhood. I'll lure her here just to watch her daughter slaughtered before her eyes." In that instant, Mona realized her father had not left prison to live—he had left to hunt.
Terrified, she tried to flee, but her father, suddenly awakened, was faster. He trapped her, brutalized her, and bolted the doors with iron. Driven by the primal instinct of motherhood, Hiba sensed the darkness closing in. She ran like a madwoman, barefoot, screaming through the streets until she reached the apartment. Khaled's eyes ignited with fires of madness. He lunged at her with a savagery she had never known, fingers tightening around her throat, attempting to extinguish the soul he had failed to break decades ago.
In that lethal moment, Mona struck with all her strength, using a heavy metal object, and let out a desperate scream that shook the building's foundations:
"Run, Mother! Save yourself and bring the police! I will hold him back… Just go!"
Hiba ran—not out of cowardice, but in frantic pursuit of survival. She pleaded with the police, shrieked for help, yet bureaucracy was colder than the crime itself: "It's a family dispute. A father disciplining his daughter. Wait for the procedures."
Two weeks later, on the morning Mona was to wear her white veil, the phone rang. A cold voice delivered the final blow:
"Are you Mona's mother? Your daughter has fallen from the eighth floor. Her body is in the morgue."
The world collapsed. It had not been a fall—it had been a discarding. Khaled stood before the prosecutor with a chilling calm only demons could possess. He claimed she had committed suicide out of shame, that his "paternal protectiveness" drove her to the edge. With no witnesses inside the locked room and evidence lost in the corridors of law, the wolf escaped the noose once more.
The wedding day arrived not with sunshine, but in a pale, ashen gray. The funeral procession wound through the neighborhood's narrow alleys. Mona was not carried in celebration, but on the shoulders of men, in a wooden casket. Her untouched white veil lay atop the coffin, fluttering in the wind as a final, tragic farewell to a world that had never been just to her.
Hiba followed with mechanical steps, shedding no audible tears, for pain beyond endurance turns into crushing silence. She stared at the veil, remembering Mona weeks before, laughing as she tried on her dress before the mirror:
"Will I look beautiful, Mother?"
Hiba's answer had always lodged in her throat—her daughter's beauty was merely another prey for a world that devours the innocent.
As the graves came into view and the earth turned cold beneath her feet, Hiba felt she was burying herself for the third time. She had buried her mother under the ruins of fire, her childhood under her father's claws, and now her only hope under the soil of treachery. A muffled wail escaped her as she laid the final handfuls of earth:
"Oh, Mona… my daughter, wedded to the grave before justice could touch you… take what remains of my heart with you, for I have no need of it in a world where a father slaughters the fruit of his own soul."
Inside the cold courtroom, under monotonous spinning ceiling fans, Khaled stood in the defendant's cage. His hair neatly combed, his face a mask of diabolical indifference, eyes gleaming with filthy triumph. As the defense lawyer spun hollow lies, claiming Mona had been "of ill repute" and took her own life to wash away her shame, the walls seemed to close in on Hiba. How could the law allow this monster to defile the dead's reputation after stealing her life? She stared at the judge with an intensity that spoke without words:
"Judge… look at this man's hands. They are not the hands of a father; they are the iron shackles that strangled my firstborn, my broken self, and now my daughter."
When the verdict came—citing lack of definitive forensic evidence—Khaled let out a faint, dry laugh, heard only by Hiba. It spoke plainly: "I have defeated you again. I killed your dream and escaped my crime." In that moment, she realized that earthly justice was merely a wooden scale in the hands of monsters who master the loopholes of law.
Returning home—a house turned cemetery for the living—Hiba entered Mona's room. Her daughter's perfume lingered in the curtains. She opened the wardrobe, and the white wedding dress fell into her lap like a weeping child. Pressing it to her chest, she spoke in a monologue dripping with grief:
"Is it the curse, Mother? Is the fire that consumed you the same that became a prison for my daughter, and then a chasm into which my granddaughter fell? We are women molded from the clay of pain, watered with the tea of abandonment, and harvested by the sickle of injustice. My father raped my childhood, my husband raped my youth and killed my daughter, and society raped my right to mourn."
She remembered Yahya, her lost son, and wondered if he had been there—would he have protected his sister? She dismissed the thought; in her family, men were either monsters or missing victims.
Standing before the mirror as she had at six years old, Hiba saw no innocence left, no hair to comb. Her face bore the map of wrinkles, her eyes the extinguished glint of cold ash. Touching her scarred face—the marks of old fire and recent blows—she whispered:
"It is over. No father, no husband, no son, and no daughter. Only me… the sole witness to a crime lasting forty years. I saw fire consume my mother, chains wrap around my neck, and my daughter's body shatter against the cold pavement."
The novel reached its agonizing peak. Hiba no longer feared death, for she had lived it over and over. Closing the window, drawing the curtains, she sat in darkness, stroking the white wedding veil, waiting for a night from which no sun would ever rise—realizing her story was not just an individual tragedy, but a muffled scream for every woman slaughtered in secret in the name of "honor," "shame," and "fatherhood."