She makes another noise and then turns and flees through the spontaneous door that brought her there.

What excellent self-control she has.

The spontaneous door closes and vanishes behind her.

Yes, yes she does.

She leans against the nearest wall, breathing heavily.

"How do I calm down?" she hisses, as though the castle might provide an answer.

Here's a spontaneous door to her bedroom, which has acquired an extra chest-of-drawers since she saw it last.

...She walks in and peers suspiciously at the chest-of-drawers.

It opens a drawer. There are things in the drawer! Perhaps she will find these things relevant to her situation!

Oh. Yeah, that works. ...They're...smaller than what she saw, before he sat down. ...That's probably a good thing.

Yes.

...Mm. Most helpful valley.

It tries.

Well that was helpful. She still wants to bang him like a pair of pots when a relative you hate is hungover, but in a more abstract and less urgent way.

...Making a much safer unwise choice than was on the table earlier, she heads back to the library and its...informative...books.

They're so informative!

Are they informative relative to the particular problem at hand, is the question.

Well, there are some things people get up to in these books that don't involve touching one another. And while no one in the books is twelve feet tall - a glaring omission! - there are some things along those general lines, if she is interested in contemplating the logistical issues involved. Gosh, some of these people are really enthusiastic about their logistically difficult endeavours.

...She reads through the logistical difficulties with interest. Gosh.

She looks through the doesn't-need-touching bits again, imagines some things, blushes brightly, tries to imagine successfully bringing this up in conversation, is unable to imagine going through with anything more eloquent than teakettle noises, and ultimately bookmarks the relevant book to the relevant page and dumps it in the art studio. Maybe that will get the point across. Maybe.

No immediate response. But maybe he'll bring it up next time they talk.

Well, he wasn't there when she did it, so obviously no immediate response.

...

She goes to the library and inquires as to whether any of the rest of the fiction in the stacks has a fictionalized version of Tarakova in it.

Yep. There are several more of those.

She had enough self-control to walk away. She does not have enough self-control not to read these books.

The first one she picks up is just straight-up rape and torture, no conflicted feelings, no detailed look at the mental state of the victims. Lots of detail about the rape and torture, though, gosh.

Not as good as the first one, but not bad.

The next one is much more romanticized and barely involves any torture at all. Plenty of rape though. And a few of the sex slaves are male, that's new.

...Ooh. Nice.

The rest of them vary in approximately that range. One of them gives him a mistress who he doesn't torture at all and only rapes twice; one of them tries to write from his point of view and the person depicted does not sound much like the Tarakova she knows; there are a few repeated themes that suggest that these people may have been working from similar sets of limited information. All together, the picture they paint of Tarakova's court is fun to fantasize about if you're into that sort of thing but also explains very clearly why someone might have wanted to kill him.