BOUND TO HER LIGHT

CHAPTER 4

By the time Isla left Duván Manor, the sky was already fading into streaks of orange and purple.

The day had felt endless.

Her nerves were still thrumming from every glance, every word, every rule in that house where silence carried like a command.

She caught the bus with the same hesitation she always had clutching her bag close, keeping her head down, hoping no one bumped into her because if she lost the little money she had left, there was nothing else.

The ride home was long. Too long.

Each passing block chipped away at the illusion of polished marble halls and perfect hedges until the real world came back into focus: cracked sidewalks, flickering streetlights, walls plastered with peeling posters and graffiti.

She climbed the narrow stairs of the apartment building and pushed open the door to the small two-room flat.

The air smelled faintly of detergent her mother’s endless laundry work and something frying in a pan.

Her father was in his usual seat by the window, shoulders hunched under the thinning fabric of his shirt. The cough rattled out of him before he could even greet her. He looked older than his forty-eight years, the illness shrinking him from the man who used to carry her on his shoulders through the market when she was little.

“Isla,” her mother said softly from the tiny kitchen corner. “You’re late.”

“I stayed to meet the children,” Isla murmured, slipping off her shoes. “They… were a lot.”

Her mother gave her a tired smile but said nothing more.

The apartment was too small for all the people inside it her sixteen-year-old brother hunched over the table fixing a neighbor’s old phone for some extra cash, her father coughing quietly, her mother stirring a pot of rice on a single-burner stove.

On the counter near the door, the envelope lay there like it always did.

The rent notice.

Isla’s eyes caught the words FINAL WARNING stamped in red before she looked away quickly.

Her mother handed her a plate, the rice barely enough for all four of them. “How was the interview?”

Isla forced a small smile. “I got the job.”

Her brother looked up, hopeful for the first time all evening. “Does it pay enough?”

Isla didn’t answer right away. The truth was, it paid better than most nanny jobs… but stacked against rent, hospital bills, food, and everything else? It barely scratched the surface.

She nodded anyway. “It will help.”

Later that night, after her father’s coughing had quieted and her brother had fallen asleep at the table, Isla sat on the thin mattress she shared with her mother and stared at the ceiling.

The neighbors were arguing next door. Someone’s baby was crying down the hall.

And through it all, she kept seeing that house in her mind all that glass and marble and money and Gabriel Duván sitting there like a king behind his rules and his walls, looking at her like she was… nothing.

And maybe she was nothing.

But she couldn’t afford to be.

Not when her family was counting on her.

She turned on her side, clutching her thin blanket tight, and promised herself one thing:

She would keep that job. No matter how cold Gabriel Duván was. No matter how many rules the house had.

She couldn’t fail. Not when failure meant losing everything.