Nihad Korhan was now one of the wealthiest men in Turkey. He lived in a yalı on the Bosphorus. He had three bodyguards, two yachts, and a granddaughter named Derya.
That was the first wound: abandonment carved into his ribs like a sailor’s tally. By sixteen, Kahraman had earned the nickname Yarali —“the wounded one”—not because he showed pain, but because he refused to. The other boys in Fatsa had fathers to teach them how to gut fish and tie knots. Kahraman had a grandmother who taught him how to read old Ottoman poetry and how to sharpen a knife without cutting himself.
Kahraman touched the long scar on his forearm—the one she had stitched—and smiled.
Kahraman had a choice: vengeance or love. The old Yarali would have killed Nihad Korhan with his bare hands, then let the guilt eat him alive. But the man sitting across from Derya—the man with stitches she had sewn—realized something terrible and beautiful. Yarali - Kahraman Tazeoglu
Derya came with him. She learned to tie proper fishing knots. She photographed the Black Sea at sunrise—not crime scenes, but living things. Gulls. Nets full of glistening horse mackerel. The way Kahraman’s scarred hands looked gentle when he held a cup of tea.
That night, Kahraman did not kill Bozkurt. That would have been too clean. Instead, he slashed the fuel lines of all four of Bozkurt’s smuggling boats, set the warehouse ablaze, and carved the word YARALI into Bozkurt’s front door with a filleting knife. Then he walked into the Black Sea up to his neck and screamed until his throat bled.
They called him Yarali there too. Not because he lost—he rarely did—but because his opponents noticed that the more they hit him, the calmer he became. A broken nose? He smiled. A split eyebrow? He wiped the blood on his bare chest and came forward again. One gambler famously said: “You can’t kill a man who already lives inside his own grave.” Nihad Korhan was now one of the wealthiest men in Turkey
She didn’t ask why he was bleeding. She didn’t call the police. She just fixed the stitches, cleaned the wound with rakı, and left a tube of antibiotic cream on the crate beside him. Then she walked away without looking back.
His father’s boat went missing during a rogue squall. No wreckage. No body. Just a crescent moon pendant left on the kitchen table, placed there by Cemal hours before he sailed—an uncharacteristic gesture of love that now felt like a goodbye note. Zeynep, unable to bear the silence of the sea, began drinking raki straight from the bottle and speaking to the wall as if it were her husband.
He did not kill Nihad Korhan. Instead, he and Derya worked together to leak the environmental crimes to a journalist at Cumhuriyet newspaper. The evidence was undeniable: toxic sludge samples, falsified maritime logs, a signed confession from a former Korhan crewman dying of cancer. That was the first wound: abandonment carved into
She was a forensic photographer, tasked with documenting crime scenes for the Istanbul police. She found Kahraman behind a fish market one night, stitching his own forearm with a needle and fishing line after a blade fight. Most people would have run. Derya knelt down, took the needle from his trembling hand, and said: “You’re doing the knots wrong. Let me.”
Yes. That Derya.
Kahraman accepted. For two years, he ran crates of untaxed tobacco and counterfeit watches along the coastal cliffs at midnight. He learned to move like a shadow, to read the wind, to trust no one. But he also learned that Bozkurt never kept promises.
One evening, as the sea turned the color of old bronze, Derya asked him: “Do you still feel like Yarali?”