The first time Doom heard her voice, he thought it was the wind whistling through the cracks in his fractured mind.
It slithered through the gaps left by his father's relentless hammering, a murmur, half-formed, like the rustle of dead leaves scraping across concrete in a forgotten alley. He'd just finished another brutal session, knuckles split open like overripe fruit, ribs a constellation of fresh agony from Kael's latest "lesson", a drill designed to teach endurance by pushing him past it. Blood, thick and metallic, dripped from his split lip as he slumped against the cold cinderblock wall of their latest compound, gasping, the world swimming in shades of grey pain.
Then it came again.
Clearer this time.
A woman's voice. Soft. Melodic. Hungry.
"Again."
Doom froze. Ice water seemed to flood his veins, momentarily eclipsing the physical agony.
He knew that voice.
Not from memory, but from the grainy, flickering images locked away in the battered suitcase, the ones where a woman with sharp eyes and a sharper smile laughed at the camera, speaking words meant for a son she'd never raise. Words promising strength, heart, dancing… lies swallowed whole by the void Kael had carved.
Ainar.
His mother.
A name that meant balance in a dialect long extinct. Or ruin, depending on who spoke it. A name Kael never uttered without a jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
And now, impossibly, she spoke to him.
---
Kael never spoke of her. Not truly. Only in flashes, a tightening around his cold eyes when her name was mentioned in hushed tones by old associates long since vanished, a flicker of something unreadable, not grief, but something darker, sharper, like a blade glimpsed in shadow, when Doom moved in a way that echoed the lethal grace captured in those fragile pixels.
Ainar had been fire and fury, a storm wrapped in deceptive silk. She and Kael had been violence made love, a duo who painted cities in gunpowder and left ashes whispering their names. Bank heists executed with chilling precision, bodies dropped like discarded puppets, a trail of blood and stolen currency that ended the night Doom was born.
The doctor had been drunk. Or careless. Or paid to be both.
It didn't matter now.
Ainar had bled out on the scratchy sheets of a nameless motel bed, her fingers twitching not in plea, but around a silent curse. A promise, jagged as the wound tearing her life away. "I'll come back," the silence seemed to scream.
Somewhere beyond the thin, blood-spattered walls, the man she loved was losing his grip, the doctor's choked-off screams mingling with the thin, rasping cries of the child clutched in one blood-slicked hand. In the end, the doctor had stolen something beyond value, and no words, not even precious, could express what Ainar had been to Kael, or what she might have been to the mewling infant. She was simply… gone.
And now, in a way, she had returned.
---
The First Lesson: Precision in Pain
At first, the whispers were just noise. Fragments of sound lost in the ringing aftermath of Kael's blows. Then, they began to guide him.
"There," Ainar's voice purred in his ear, sinuous and cold as a serpent's coil, as his fist connected solidly with the heavy leather of a training dummy's torso. "Not like that. Higher."
The voice wasn't gentle instruction; it was a predator correcting its cub. "Feel for the gap between the ribs. The softness beneath the cage. Now."
He adjusted, driven less by conscious thought than by the compelling hiss in his mind. His knuckles, already raw, slammed into the precise spot. The sound wasn't just impact; it was the sharp, wet crunch of simulated cartilage giving way. Beautiful. The way the dummy shuddered on its stand, the way the pain in his own hand was momentarily eclipsed by a surge of sick satisfaction that made his blood hum. This was power, cleaner, sharper than blind rage.
His father noticed. Of course he did. The old man's cold eyes, like chips of flint, tracked Doom's movements. He saw the subtle adjustments, the way his son's strikes shifted from brutal force to precise, surgical brutality. A cold efficiency Kael himself possessed, but this… carried a different rhythm. Ainar's rhythm.
"He thinks you're improving," Ainar's spectral voice laughed, the sound dripping with dark amusement. "He doesn't realize it's me. He doesn't realize you're mine now." The possessive hunger in the words vibrated through Doom's bones.
Kael stepped closer, his expression unreadable granite. For a moment, Doom thought he saw something flicker in those dead eyes, not wonder, but recognition. The ghost of a movement, a lethal cadence he'd seen before, long buried.
Then it was gone, smoothed over by glacial indifference.
"Again," Kael growled, tossing him another knife, its edge gleaming wickedly in the harsh training lights.
Ainar's laughter curled around Doom's spine like a lover's chilling touch, spurring him on. For the first time, a sliver of doubt pierced the numbness, was this how things might have been if his mother had lived? Or was this something else entirely, a haunting with teeth?.
---
The Second Lesson: The Calculus of Control
The voice didn't just teach violence. It taught control. Cold, merciless, absolute control.
When he held a knife, phantom hands, insubstantial yet impossibly real, wrapped around his, guiding the blade along flesh, not just through it. Showing him where to cut for screams, not silence. For maximum terror, not just maximum blood loss. "People are like books," Ainar whispered, her breath a frosty caress against his ear.
"Cut the right page, and the whole story falls apart. Make them feel the unraveling."
When he held a gun, her voice murmured corrections, stripping away hesitation. "Tilt your wrist. Just a fraction. Feel the balance shift?, There. Now pull."
And the bullet would find its mark, an eye, a kneecap, the tiny gap in body armor, with terrifying, economical accuracy. Efficiency elevated to an art form.
His father watched, silent as a tomb. The silence was heavier than any critique.
Then, one day, after Doom placed a single, perfect round between the painted eyes of a target fifty yards distant, a shot taken without seeming to aim, pure instinct guided by the spectral hand, Kael did something strange.
He smiled.
It wasn't warm. It wasn't kind. It held no affection. But it was the closest thing to approval Doom had ever witnessed. A predator acknowledging a successful hunt by its offspring.
"That," his father muttered, the words low, almost lost, "was her shot."
Ainar's ghostly presence, usually a constant, humming pressure, went utterly, terrifyingly still. The air in the range seemed to thicken, charged with static.
Then she laughed. Not her usual dark amusement, but a low, dangerous sound that scraped like claws down Doom's spine. "He remembers," the voice hissed, thick with a triumph that felt ancient and predatory. "He remembers the ruin."
---
The Third Lesson: Lust as Leverage
And when he held a woman…
Ainar's voice curled around him like acrid smoke, sinful and knowing, twisting the hunger Kael had unleashed into something sharper, more cruel. "Touch her here," she murmured, her words velvet commands laced with broken glass.
Her phantom touch mapped a path across the trembling skin of the woman beneath him, Lena, her name surfaced briefly, another ghost soon forgotten. "Feel how she shivers? That's fear. That's power. Raw. Delicious."
The spectral fingers pressed, insistent. "Now twist it. Make it pleasure. Make her beg for the hand that terrifies her. Make her yours."
Doom obeyed. He always obeyed the voices that promised power, the ones that resonated with the void within. Lena gasped, her breath hitching in shallow, uneven bursts as his hands traced the lines Ainar dictated. She didn't understand the cold calculation behind the touch, why the fear coiling like a serpent in her belly felt inseparable from a treacherous, unwanted heat, their venom leaving her dizzy, weak, aching for release that felt like surrender.
"Good," Ainar crooned from the shadows only he could perceive, her voice slick with dark approval. "She's yielding. Now show her the cost of disobedience. Remind her who holds the leash."
Doom's grip, large and unyielding, closed around her throat. Not enough to steal her breath, but enough to make her pulse stutter wildly against his palm, to dim the edges of the cheap motel room. He hooked her legs over his shoulders, pressing her deeper into the thin mattress, the weight of him, the sheer presence of him, inescapable.
When he thrust into her, hard and unforgiving, Lena's back arched off the bed, her mouth falling open in a soundless gasp before a ragged moan tore free, laced with terror and unwanted ecstasy.
She wasn't used to him, not his size, not the way he filled her until she felt stretched, invaded, owned. The stretch bordered on pain, the pleasure sharp, cutting, inseparable from the fear. Around them, the world carried on.
The walls were thin, the staff knew better than to intervene. If anyone heard her cries, raw, ragged, the desperate sounds of a creature caught between the abyss and a fleeting, terrifying peak, they pretended otherwise. To acknowledge it was to invite Doom's attention. And no one was foolish enough to want that.
---
To the outside world, he looked like a man muttering to himself, lost in the labyrinth of his own shattered psyche. Kael dismissed it as exhaustion, the inevitable fraying of nerves after too many blows to the head, too many nights steeped in blood and rage. Just the mind breaking under pressure, a weapon pushed to its limits.
The others whispered that he was cracked. Broken beyond repair. A blade sharpened too hard, until the steel itself began to splinter.
But Doom no longer knew if he was hallucinating.
No longer cared.
Ainar's voice was silk and smoke, curling around his thoughts like a second, invasive nervous system. Her phantom touches lingered: fingertips brushing the nape of his neck when he tried to sleep, a palm pressed like ice between his shoulder blades as he fought, guiding him, claiming him. Was this madness? Or was it something grander, something unholy? A communion with the ghost of the storm that birthed him?
Ainar laughed when he wondered this, her delight a razor dragged along the raw edges of his soul. "Does it matter ?" she murmured, the words slithering into his core. "I'm here. You're mine. That's all that's ever mattered."
And she was right.
Because when she spoke, the world made sense in ways Kael's brutal logic never had. It was a sense written in blood and the cold geometry of suffering.
---
Then, one night, Kael did the unthinkable.
He showed a flicker of something resembling remorse.
Doom had come back from a job, the coppery scent of death clinging to his skin, Ainar's whispers still humming like static in his veins. Kael looked at him, really looked at him, and for the first time, Doom saw something like… loss in those perpetually dead eyes. Not grief for a person, but for a concept. A path not taken.
"You move like her," the old man said, his voice rough, unused to such admissions. "You kill like her." There was no warmth in the observation, only a stark, chilling acknowledgment.
Ainar's ghost went preternaturally still, a predator sensing vulnerability.
Kael reached out. The movement was stiff, alien. His calloused fingers, stained with the grime of a thousand crimes, brushed his son's cheek, a gesture so foreign it felt like a betrayal, a violation of their entire brutal dynamic.
"I should have killed that doctor slower."
The words were flat, devoid of true regret, only a colder assessment of inadequate vengeance.
"He loved me," Ainar whispered, her voice thick with a triumph that tasted like ashes. "But you… you are me."
Doom knew then, with a certainty colder than the grave, that he would never escape her. The ghost, the whisper, the guiding hand of ruin. And worse, buried beneath the horror, a treacherous part of him didn't want to. Because she was shaping him, honing him into something terrifyingly beautiful. Something utterly ruinous. Something hers.
And that, more than anything Kael had ever done, felt like coming home. Not to warmth, but to the heart of the storm. To the legacy of the mother he never knew, delivered from beyond the veil of death. The void within him pulsed, not in protest, but in recognition. It had found a new master. Or perhaps, an echo of the first.