The first time Doom heard her voice, he thought it was the wind.
It slithered through the cracks of his fractured mind, a murmur, half-formed, like the rustle of dead leaves in a forgotten graveyard. He'd just finished another brutal training session, his knuckles split, his ribs aching from his father's relentless drills. Blood dripped from his lip as he slumped against the wall of the compound, gasping.
Then it came again.
Clearer this time.
A woman's voice. Soft. Melodic. Hungry.
"Again," it whispered.
Doom froze.
He knew that voice.
Not from memory, but from the grainy home videos his father kept locked away, 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.
Ainar.
His mother.
A name that meant balance in a dead language. Or ruin, depending on who spoke it.
And now, impossibly, she spoke to him.
---
His father never spoke of her. Not truly. Only in flashes, a clenched jaw when her name was mentioned, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes when Doom moved in a way that reminded him of her.
Ainar had been fire and fury, a storm wrapped in silk. She and Doom's father had been violence made love, a duo who left ashes in their wake. Bank heists painted in gunpowder, bodies dropped with clinical precision, a trail of blood and money that ended the night Doom was born.
The doctor had been drunk. Or careless. Or both.
It didn't matter now.
Ainar had bled out on a stained motel bed, her fingers twitching against the sheets as the last breath left her. Not a whisper, not a plea, a curse. A promise, jagged as the wound in her side.
"I'll come back."
Somewhere beyond the thin walls, the man she loved was losing his mind. The doctor's screams tangled with the sobs of a child, his son, clutched in one blood-slicked hand.
In the end, the doctor had taken something beyond value. No words, not even precious, could express what Ainar had been to the man or what she would have been to the child.
And now, in a way, she had returned.
---
The First Lesson
At first, the whispers were just noise. Fragments. Then, they guided him.
"There," Ainar's voice purred in his ear as his fist connected with a training dummy's ribs. "Not like that. Higher. Feel for the gap between the bones. Now." crunch.
The sound was beautiful. The way the wood splintered beneath his knuckles, the way the dummy's frame shuddered, it sent a thrill through him, a sick satisfaction that made his blood sing.
His father noticed. Of course he did. The old man's cold eyes tracked Doom's movements, watching as his son adjusted his stance mid-strike, as his blows became precise, surgical. Brutal in ways he hadn't been before.
"He thinks you're improving," Ainar laughed, her voice dripping with amusement. "He doesn't realize it's me. He doesn't realize you're mine now."
Doom's father stepped closer, his expression unreadable. For a moment, Doom thought he saw something flicker in those dead eyes, recognition? Wonder?
Then it was gone.
"Again," his father growled, tossing him another knife.
Ainar's laughter curled around Doom's spine like a lover's touch.
For the first time, Doom wondered, was this how things could have been if his mother had lived? Or was this something else entirely?
---
The Second Lesson: Control
The voice didn't just teach him violence. It taught him control.
When he held a knife, her phantom hands wrapped around his, guiding the blade along flesh, showing him where to cut for maximum pain, for maximum effect.
"People are like books," Ainar whispered, her breath hot against his ear. "Cut the right page, and the whole story falls apart."
When he held a gun, she murmured corrections "Tilt your wrist. Just a fraction. There. Now pull the trigger" and the bullet found its mark with terrifying accuracy.
His father watched, silent.
Then, one day, after Doom put a bullet between the eyes of a target thirty yards away, the man did something strange.
He smiled.
It wasn't warm. It wasn't kind. But it was the closest thing to approval Doom had ever gotten.
"That was her shot," his father muttered, almost to himself.
Ainar's ghost went very, very still.
Then she laughed, low and dangerous.
"He remembers."
---
The Third Lesson: Desire
And when he held a woman…
Ainar's voice curled around him like smoke, sinful and knowing. "Touch her here," she murmured, her words a velvet command. "Feel how she shivers? That's fear. That's power. Now make it pleasure. Make her yours."
Doom obeyed. He always obeyed.
Lena, her name was Lena, He marveled, not for the first time, at how effortlessly the names clung to him, each one a ghost he wore like second skin, beneath him, her breath hitching in shallow, uneven gasps as his hands traced the lines Ainar dictated across her skin. She didn't understand why her skin burned under his touch, why fear and want coiled together like serpents in her belly, their venom leaving her dizzy, aching.
"Good," Ainar crooned from the shadows, her voice slick with approval. "Now show her what happens when she tries to disobey."
Doom's grip tightened around her throat, not enough to steal her breath, but enough to make her pulse stutter, to dim the world at the edges. He hooked her legs over his shoulders, pressing her deeper into the mattress, the weight of him inescapable.
When he thrust into her, hard and unforgiving, Lena's back arched, her mouth falling open in a soundless gasp before the moan tore free.
She wasn't used to him, not his size, not the way he filled her until she swore she could feel him in her bones. The stretch bordered on pain, the pleasure sharp enough to cut.
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 pleasure and terror, 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 his own head. His father dismissed it as exhaustion, the inevitable toll of relentless training. Just the mind fraying at the edges after too many blows to the skull, too many nights spent choking on blood and rage.
The others whispered that he was cracked. Broken. A weapon 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 nervous system. Her phantom touches lingered, fingertips brushing the nape of his neck when he slept, a palm pressed between his shoulder blades as he fought, guiding him, claiming him.
Was this madness?
Or was it something grand, something unholy?
Ainar laughed when he wondered this, her delight a razor dragged along his spine. "Does it matter ?"she murmured. "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 it never had before.
----
Then, one night, his father did something inconceivable.
He showed remorse.
Doom had come back from a job, blood on his hands, Ainar's whispers still humming in his veins. His father looked at him, really looked at him and for the first time, Doom saw something like grief in those dead eyes.
"You move like her," the old man said, voice rough. "You kill like her."
Ainar's ghost went still.
Doom's father reached out, fingers brushing his son's cheek, a gesture so foreign it felt like a betrayal.
"I should have killed that doctor slower."
"He loved me" Ainar whispered, her voice thick with triumph. "But you are me."
Doom knew then that he would never escape her.
And worse, he didn't want to.
Because she was shaping him into something beautiful.
Something ruinous.
Something hers.
And that, more than anything, felt like coming home.