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Killer Queen

Summary:

A mysterious singer, men turning up dead, and Jaina piecing together the common thread in the people they'd hurt.

The woman's voice rattling in her head, cutting her to the quick, asking her if justice is ever truly served.
“Surely there are better ways to ensure men like that get what they deserve?"

Notes:

Chapter 1: Code Violations

Notes:

So technically I started this before I started Last Resort and it was sitting there with 4 out of 7 chapters written for years. But I've written all but the epilogue now, and it's time to share my problematic sylvanas serial killer fic!

This fic contains themes of abuse and revenge.

Chapter 1 references date rape drugs.

Chapter Text

Jaina felt like she was being watched. It was a paranoia born of long experience in a military family and an overbearing father who’d hoped she’d follow in his footsteps. She hadn’t, of course. While Jaina was more than capable of defending herself, she had no desire to be an instrument of death to innocent people on the other side of the world.

There were plenty of people who deserved it right at home, but even then she balked at the idea of causing harm. A coward, the Admiral had called her. The Admiral, because that was how he preferred to be called even at home.

Shaking off both the thought of her father and the feeling of being watched, she stepped past a woman dancing at the door and into the party.

The music was not really her style, but it had a nice beat at least. She was more or less here for a few drinks and to relax from the pressure of midterms. Of course, for Jaina, the pressure was the fear of getting anything less than perfect scores, and with one professor who gave out perfect scores about once a decade, she was feeling particularly stressed.

Maybe she should have gone to MIT, but that would put her within 500 miles of both her father in DC and her ex-boyfriend in New York and that was simply too close, so Caltech had been her second choice.

Of course, Jaina was a woman who’d spent five years doing aid work on the literal other side of the world to get away from her father. So Caltech had been the obvious choice when she’d returned to resume her schooling, as it was as far as she could get and still be in the continental United States. Not that such work had been as fulfilling as she’d hoped, and political donations only went so far. It was rarely fast enough.

Elbowing her way through the crowd, she got herself a drink and slipped into a room where live music was playing. A makeshift stage had been set up, creaking dangerously and Jaina realized it was little more than some folding tables and chairs tied together. That wasn’t safe at all. That was definitely some kind of code violation.

On top of the ‘stage’, a woman wearing black pants was playing an electric guitar and screeching into a microphone.

Screeching was about the kindest that Jaina could say about it, as she winced and knocked back half her drink. The guitar playing was really good, but the woman sounded like a fucking banshee.

She was hot, though. Long blonde hair pulled back in two braids, black eyeliner and make-up painted to make it look like bloody tears running down from light blue eyes. She wore a mesh top over a black bra, and her stiletto boots could probably kill a man. Jaina could think of at least two she’d put at the front of the list.

Distracted, Jaina was jostled as a man bumped into her, sloshing her drink. She broke eye contact with the singer to glare at his back.

The spell seemed to be broken though, and she moved away from the dangerous stage.

“Hey, have you seen James?”

She turned to the woman who spoke, giving her a tight smile. “No, I haven’t seen him, Mara.”

And she hoped she didn’t. She didn’t know too much about him, but she knew that Mara often sported suspicious bruises. And judging from the mixture of fear and relief in Mara’s eyes, that suspicion was probably true. Jaina’s tone was gentle, “Hey, do you have a ride home?”

Mara nodded, gesturing towards the woman on stage, “She’s taking me home.”

“Well, I can’t imagine anyone giving you trouble with her around,” Jaina admitted, struggling to tear her eyes from the singer. She lifted her drink to her lips, then immediately spit it back out.

Her eyes darted around the room, looking for the man who’d bumped into her. With a heavy sigh she dumped her drink into a plant and moved to a corner of the room where she could watch almost everyone. She’d been lucky. Someone else might not.

She’d just have to get drunk off her ass at home alone.

Again.

But the view was nice, even if that woman couldn’t sing to save her life. As if reading her mind, and only to prove Jaina wrong, she next launched into a hauntingly beautiful song. Jaina knew better, but she almost felt like the song had been for her.

And from the way the singer’s eyes locked onto hers, she wondered if it actually was. After a trick of the light made them almost seem to glint red, Jaina forced herself to look away, reminding herself that she’d chosen to forgo fun to keep an eye on other women at this party. There was a man putting roofies in drinks and she’d be damned if she let him get away with it.

There! She spotted him, close to a girl clearly too young to be at this party. Pushing off from the wall, Jaina reached into the pocket of her jeans and fingered the expandable baton she carried for self defense.

As the song carried on, the tune like a siren’s call, Jaina caught the girl’s wrist before she could drink. The girl looked at her in confusion before Jaina murmured, “He drugged it. Call a taxi and go home.”

The man, only a few years younger than her, stared at her with wild, angry eyes, but he turned and started pushing his way through the party. After pointing the girl to a friend she trusted, Jaina began to give chase, and as she followed him into the cold, damp night, she heard the song come to a stop with a dark, seductive laugh that sent a jolt between her legs. She didn’t look, but she felt as though if she did, the woman’s eyes would be boring into her.

First, she was going to make that man piss his pants, then she was going to go back inside and… what? Jaina didn’t know. Chat the singer up? Get her number, at least. That was reasonable?

She didn’t exactly have much experience in that department and two of her lovers had been steady boyfriends and one a steady girlfriend. The boring kind. Nothing like a goth woman with illegally tight pants.

Catching sight of the man across the street, Jaina burst into a sprint, pulling the baton out of her pocket but not extending it yet. Instead, she kept it flush along the inside of her wrist; it was for self defense, but she wasn’t above a little intimidation. She wasn’t a pacifist and this man’s actions were high on the list of reasons for allowable acts of violence.

Darting between two houses, Jaina emerged onto another street and cut him off as he tried to cross it. She body checked him, sending him sprawling on the ground. A bottle rolled out of his sleeve and against the curb. Kneeling, Jaina inspected it, careful not to touch it without a cloth. She was fairly sure it was GHB and felt a surge of cold rage. She pulled out her phone, gripping the baton in her other hand tighter, “I’m going to call the police and you’re going to explain what you were doing tonight.”

She snapped her wrist, the steel baton extending to its full three feet of length before she brandished it at him and said, “Now don’t move.”

Hours later, Jaina finally returned home. She’d given her statement and the bottle to the police, and they’d gone to interview others at the party. It probably wouldn’t do much good, but there wasn’t anything else Jaina could have done short of beating him to death. And that wasn’t her style, even if rage burned inside her. Almost every damn day, stoked by the news. But she wasn’t a killer.

Making sure her door was locked, Jaina pulled a bottle from a cabinet and sank onto the couch, absently scritching at the head of her russian blue cat, Kalec, as he hopped onto the arm of the couch to greet her. “It’s just you and me again tonight. But.” She opened the bottle, “Some sacrifices are worth it.”