The first time Moros 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"-one of those drills that would teach endurance by pushing him past it. Blood, thick and metallic, oozed from his split lip as he slumped against the cold cinderblock wall of their latest compound, gasping, world swimming in shades of gray pain.
Then it came again.
Clearer this time.
A woman's voice. Soft. Melodic. Hungry.
"Again."
Moros froze. Ice water seemed to flood his veins, momentarily eclipsing the physical agony.
He knew that voice.
Not from memory, but from those grainy, flickering images shut 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, in a dialect long extinct, meant balance. Or ruin, depending on who spoke it. A name Kael never spoke without his jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
And now, impossibly, she spoke to him.
He never spoke of her. Not really. 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 which 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 become 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 no longer mattered.
She had bled out onto the scratchy sheets of some 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," seemed to scream out of the silence.
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
First, the whispers were just noise, fragments of sound lost in the ringing aftermath of Kael's blows. Then they started 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 Moros's movements. He saw the subtle adjustments, the way his son's strikes shifted from brutal force into precise, surgical brutality. 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 sent a vibration through Moros's bones.
Kael stepped closer, his face unreadable granite. For an instant, Moros 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, a lover's chilling touch that spurred him onward. For the first time, a sliver of doubt pierced the numbness, was this how things might have been, if his mother lived? Or was this something else entirely, a haunting with teeth?
---
The Second Lesson: The Calculus of Control
The voice had not only taught violence, but it inculcated control, cold, merciless, and absolute.
When he held a knife, phantom hands-insubstantial and impossibly real-wrapped about 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 cold against his ear.
"Cut the right page and the whole story falls apart. Make them feel the unraveling."
Her voice murmured corrections when he held a gun, 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, as silent as a tomb. The silence was heavier than any critique.
One day, after Doom put 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, or 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 were 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 Moros's spine. "He remembers," the voice hissed, thick with a triumph that felt ancient and predatory.
---
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 he had unleashed into something sharper, something 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 did-obeyed the voice 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 snake 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 unyielding, Lena 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 was not 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. The world went on around them.
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 Moros's attention. And no one was foolish enough to want that.
To the outside world, he sounded like a man who had been muttering to himself, lost in some sort of labyrinth of his own shattered psyche. Kael chalked it up to exhaustion, the inevitable fraying at the edges of nerves after too many blows to the head, too many nights steeped in blood and rage. 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 Moros no longer knew whether he was hallucinating.
He cared no more.
Ainar's voice was silk and smoke, curling about his thoughts like a second, invasive nervous system. The memory of her phantom touches lingered on, fingertips against 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 sliding 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, a sense written in blood and suffering.
---
Then, one night, Kael did the unthinkable.
He showed a flicker of something resembling remorse. Moros had just returned from the job, the coppery taste of death clinging to his skin and Ainar's whispers still buzzing like static in his veins. Kael really looked at him for once, and for the first time, Moros saw something like loss in those perpetually dead eyes. Not for a person, but 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, and her voice was thick with a triumph that tasted of ashes. "But you… you are me." Moros knew then, with a certainty colder than the grave, he would never be able to 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, for 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 found another master.