Some houses speak. Ours never did.
It watched.
Tucked into the forested edge of Bainbridge Island, the Vang Estate overlooked Puget Sound like a throne gazing down on its dominion. The Seattle skyline shimmered in the distance, close enough to touch—yet it might as well have been another world. That was the paradox of my childhood: surrounded by beauty, but never belonging to it.
The estate was architectural poetry—stone, glass, and steel carved into precision. The kind of place that belonged on magazine covers, in political fundraisers, not in the dreams of a boy who just wanted to disappear. Everything was always too perfect. The gardens trimmed like secrets. The air heavy with expectation. Even the koi in the pond seemed to swim with purpose.
People called us the Vangs of Bainbridge, like that meant something. Like the name alone should make you kneel.
But inside, it was cold.
Not temperature—something worse.
Sterile. Hollow. Controlled.
My father built empires. My mother preserved appearances. And I… I wandered the estate like a shadow pinned between glass and legacy. The boat docked out back? Never left its slip. The pagoda at the water’s edge? It held more ghosts than prayers. And the pool? Just another mirror I learned to avoid.
I spent more time staring across the bay than speaking inside these walls. Seattle’s glow would flicker over the water at night, and I’d pretend—just for a moment—that I lived in one of those windows. That I wasn’t a Vang. That I didn’t carry blood laced with deals, demons, and destinies I never asked for.
But every morning, I’d wake up in the same room. Same silence. Same weight pressing into my chest like inheritance.
Still… this place forged me.
It taught me how to move unseen. How to listen for what isn’t said. How to guard what you love by burying it deep. And maybe that’s why I saw her when no one else could—why I felt her long before I knew her name.
Feng.
She came from the shadows.
And for once, I didn’t want to disappear.
— Luke Vang