Chapter 1 - Of Heirlooms and Collections

"Excuse me, madam." The woman looked up at the sound, and he couldn't help but marvel at her eyes, like icicles blazing at him from behind the thin lenses of her glasses.
"Can I help you?" she smiled politely, albeit with a faintly quizzical edge tracing the question.
He simply smiled, stepping forward, appraising her as he did so with a glance. Strappy high heels that looked like pale gold and sheer black tights contrasted with the rather conservatively-styled grey trousers and white blouse she wore. "Oh, yes," he murmured with a slight bow. "I was wondering if I could speak with the senior member representing the Library or the Acquisitions Department itself?"
She smiled coolly. "That is me. Ms Chrys Kent, I'm the Head Librarian for the Acquisitions Department in fact, Mr...?" She cast her own eye over the visitor. Chinese clearly enough, with all the poise of a model. Flecks of silver in his black hair contrasted the youthful looking face, though the stubble adorning his jaw was trimmed just so as to look perfectly at home on any man. A dark grey suit, stripped of its tie and with a collar undone, but for all that it wouldn't have looked out of place on a James Bond actor. On some it would have looked sloppy, but instead it just accentuated the casual air about him.
"Forgive me, Ms Kent. I am Liao Gang Chang. As you might guess," he smiled, "I am not one of the students, but I know your supervisor, a mister Mathers?" He didn't wait for a response, just quirking an eye at a chair with a smile. His voice was like dark chocolate; rich with a contrast of exoticness to it, and she felt herself warm to him a little at the sound of it.
"I...see. Well, Mr Liao, please, take a seat." She waited for him to pull the one on the other side of her desk out and sit down on it before leaning back and bracing her hands together. "How is it exactly I can help you?"

Liao smiled politely, but briefly, almost as if it was just out of habit rather than any real desire. "I am, with no false modesty, a very wealthy man, Ms Kent. I am also a man who believes thoroughly in documenting human knowledge, and preserving what we learn for those who come after us."
"I see," Chrys said slowly. "It's a laudable goal, but I don't quite see what it has to do with me?"
"I am told that in addition to the publicly available sections here at Racks View, there is a very extensive private section," he said with a smile that for all its friendliness clashed with the coldness in his eyes. Chrys tensed at that. 'He doesn't mean...Ms Pryor's collection? Oh crap!' It had only been a few days since Ms Pryor had 'talked' to her, and she doubted anyone who Ms Pryor had willingly told about the collection would be coming to talk to her about it. Mr Liao coughed gently, and she snapped back to reality. "Well," she began, nerves fraying as she eyed the cold eyes, "I'm afraid I don't know about any such collection. We only have what you see out on the shelves in the main chambers."
"Are you certain?" he asked politely again, but with an edge of iron stroking behind the question.
"Very. I'm sorry I couldn't help you, Mr Liao."
"I had a most horrible feeling you would say such, Ms Kent." Like a snake leaping on its prey, he stood, splaying the fingers of his right hand out. A compact gun-like object shot into his hand from up his sleeve, and he braced it at her chest. "Allow me to persuade you otherwise." He pulled the trigger slowly, and Chrys shuddered in her chair as the taser dart hit her, the raven-black hair on her head falling down the back of the chair like a waterfall as her head lolled drunkenly and she fell into unconsciousness.

Her arms felt like they were made of lead, and her head pounded with the distant echo of a headache. Her eyes cracked open blearily and she winced at the sunlight before opening them a little wider, rolling her head to one side to look at anything else but the window. She choked back a indignant gasp at what she saw, her face red with anger. She could see the back of her recent visitor's head as he gently tapped along the back wall, like he was searching for something. "Ah, Ms Kent, you are awake. I am very glad. For a moment, I must confess I was worried the dart was too powerful." He didn't even look away from his work, still tapping every few inches with his knuckles.
"Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?" she snarled.
"I, quite reasonably, assumed that as the head of the acquisitions department, you would have your own way to the private stockpile." Finally he turned his head around at her, a frown on his lips. "Am I incorrect?"
"Hell yes you are! There's no private section!" Chrys moved to push herself up, slamming back down as she realised she couldn't move her arms at all. Only when she glanced down did she see the ropes around her more-than-modestly sized bosom, pinning her arms to the small of her back.

"I believe that you are lying to me, Ms Kent," Liao stated simply as he turned and walked over to her bound form. She realised she was lying on top of her own desk, the notes and books, the computer monitor that had all occupied its surface now all stacked up neatly on top of her cabinet files. She could just see ropes around her ankles as well. "I hope you enjoy my ropework," Liao said, his hands pulling her back down flat on the desk with gentle firmness, something sorely lacking in most of her experiences at the library. "I am told that you often have a way of finding yourself in such, shall we say 'compromising' situations?" She could her face blush at the thought of some of those very same situations. "However," he carried on like a lecturer now, head bowed slightly, hands folded behind his back as he slowly paced around her like a shark circling its prey, "I am no barbarian. Simply tell me where I can find access to the private collection of Ms Pryor and I shall be on my way once I have untied you."
She could feel the anger rising inside her. Just another creep who wanted to molest her for the sake of books that she was quite sure she didn't want to admit to knowing about. 'How dare he?!' Gritting her teeth, she spat her answer back at him. "No."

He stopped, glancing up to the ceiling as he seemed to chew his lip in thought. "Very well."
Swift hands plucked open the straps of her heels before pulling them off her feet as smoothly as if they'd been covered with ice, and Chrys kicked up at the errant visitor. Deft hands caught her bound ankles easily, Liao twisting as lightly as a feather to perch himself on the end of the desk and tucking her ankles under his arm. "I must say, Ms Kent, you do a most wonderful job of keeping these in condition."
Chrys was more than a little confused now, her face clear with puzzlement. "The...the books?"
"No," he said with a mischievous smile over his shoulder. Her stupefied expression cracked into a giggle as she felt his fingers begin to spider their way down the length of her soles, the soft motions stroking delicately through the wispy nylon adorning her legs. He worked in silence, fingers spiralling like a hurricane over the ball of one foot before twitching over the arch of the other, his nails slowly pistoning up and down, trailing goosebumps in their wake, and she giggled in a low purr, her anger shrivelling up at the sensations.

"Now, Ms Kent, I shall start to ask you questions, and I expect your full cooperation when doing so." Abruptly the teasing stopped, and Chrys almost felt a little emptier, as if she resented losing the tactile delight. Out of her sight, Liao repositioned his hands, bringing the fingers of each one below the toes of each foot, just precious millimetres away from the skin he was willing to make his art upon. "Ms Pryor, your immediate senior here at Racks View, has a private collection of books. Yes, or no?"
"N-" she was cut off before she could even finish what she was saying, her deep purr turning into a throaty chuckle as his nails edged their way into the soft flesh of her toes, digging in like shovels into soft earth, before lifting away and raking back down again.
"Are you sure, Ms Kent?"
She just laughed and shook her head frantically as her mouth curled into a pleading, close-lip smile. Liao sighed and stopped, lowering her ankles back onto the desk again before he stood up and reached under the desk for something. A bag came out in his hand, and he slowly pulled a length of rope out with unhurried grace. "Your students here are most...unusual, should I say? I borrowed this bag from a young couple who were being quite undignified, and loud, in the Classical Literature section." While he was talking, the rope in his hands was coiled around her thighs, cinched taut with a yank that made Chrys wince.

"You know," she began to say with a smile, "I've been tied up a lot better by other creeps."
"Oh?"
"Not that it matters," she grinned now, almost manic in her determination to show off her current visitor, "because there isn't a private collection."
"I see..." Liao pursed his lips in thought for a moment, arrythmic fingers idly tapping along the surface of the desk. "I am afraid I cannot simply take your word for that." He reached back down into the bag, pulling out another coil of rope, and he began to lash her thighs down to the desk, leaning over her legs to reach for the rope as it was passed underneath the surface she lay on. Chrys couldn't help the blush on her face as she felt his face press next to her legs, and thought of what else he could do if he wanted...or what she wanted him to. 'Oh what the hell! This is not the time,' she shouted inside her head, concentrating on the bite of the ropes as they dug through the nylon and pressed against her skin so tightly it felt like he was branding them. By the time he was done, she could hardly lift her legs. That just made the next part even worse as she couldn't fight it. Another length of rope was pulled from the bag, and she wondered how many coils the damn thing held inside, stopping only as she watched Liao begin to fashion it into a noose, a dismayed look written all over her face.

She writhed frantically as he walked up to where her head lay, but the rope about her legs seemed as if it was tightening the more she struggled, like a constrictor crushing its prey. Chrys even tried to bite his hand as it tugged the noose just below her chin, but Liao ignored her simply to press the top of her head against his chest, hand pressing her jaw closed while he tugged the other part of the noose around the back of her neck. "I regret the necessity for this, Ms Kent, but you did force my hand so." She bit her lip, knowing she couldn't do anything about the wateriness of her eyes other than closing them. The noose began to press inwards as if her neck was the drawstring bag she kept what little jewellery she owned, and Liao's hand pressed on her back firmly until she was sitting with her body upright. "There, Ms Kent. You need not fear undue harm at my hands, I assure you." Chrys opened her eyes warily, looking as best she could without turning her head. She could feel his hands working at the nape of her neck, and the noose tightened just a little more as he stopped what he was doing. "There. I have tied the ropes such that they are keeping you suspended, though I must advise you do not test their suspension capabilities." By now he'd walked around, past the far end of the desk to her own private shelving for books she thought needed restricted access for their age, bending ever so slightly as to allow him to examine the spines of the books there. "Quite interesting, Ms Kent. Is that a first-generation copy of Tolkien's 'The Hobbit'?"

Chrys just glared at his back while he carried on. "Oh my. The complete ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica!" He picked up one of the volumes, turning to her with a polite smile. "The famous 'scholar's edition', though it is a shame that they devoted little critical thought to the theory of evolution, simply assuming it was probably wrong." He stepped closer and wafted the book at her. "Did you know, Ms Kent, that each volume of the ninth edition is around two and a half inches thick?" Still smiling, he pulled at the rope on her ankles, lifting them without visible effort and sliding the book underneath before he lowered it again. Chrys scowled at him. "Are you crazy?" she screeched fiercely, "That book is well over a hundred years old! You could damage it!" Liao shrugged wordlessly, pacing over to the contents of her desk that he'd stacked elsewhere and searching her box of stationary until he found what he'd been looking for. She could see one of the things he'd plundered from her stuff was a paperclip that he'd bent out into an almost straight line, before he crouched down at the end of the desk, face hidden behind her feet. "Now, Ms Kent. I will ask you again; Ms Pryor has a private collection of antique books stored here in the library. Yes, or no?" Her silence was his only answer.

"Very well," he said with a shrug before he leaned towards her nylon-covered legs, that paperclip clenched in his fingers. With soft, but decisive, hands, he bent two of her toes apart, pressing the nylon down under the pressure of the paperclip as it was stretched taut. Chrys' face flickered with a reluctant smile as she felt the sharp metal slowly scratch down the side of her toe in impossibly tight spirals, leaving the epicentre of each circle goosebumped in their wake, unable to move away as his fingers clamped her feet down like bands of warm iron. The paperclip started working down then, and she giggled as she felt it press down at the joint. The trickling giggle began to course faster as his hands worked the metal down at the webs of her toes, moving up the side of the next one as if it was a mountaineer and her toes were mesas for the slight tool to climb its way up. "Yes, or no, Ms Kent. Decide."
"Yes! Okay, yes!" she said it with a laugh. By then the paperclip had finished its travels over her toes and was meandering across the ball of her foot. She still couldn't see his face, but she could practically hear the smile in his voice."And where is this collection located, Ms Kent?"
Still the sharp wire probed across her skin, like a surgeon dithering over where to make an incision, until she screamed at him, "I can't tell you!"

"Yes, you can. You are simply choosing not to, and I am choosing to persuade you to choose otherwise." The scratching stopped for a moment, and Chrys gulped in the biggest breaths she could manage without moving the noose. Part of her felt suffocated by it, even though her mind knew it wasn't tight enough for it to be doing that at all, and she tried to drown that fear inside her mind, focusing on anything else she could. Her eyes found the sight of Liao picking up another pair of the Britannica volumes, holding them loosely in each hand. Gently he set one down besides her, his other hand hooking the ropes on her ankles and lifting them, setting off a shiver of pain in her knees as he bent her legs forwards. The other hand had a volume, and this was wedged underneath her ankles before he let go of the rope again. His hands were braced on either side of the desk, his chest overhanging her legs, and his voice was as implacable in its relentlessness as a mountain. "That is five inches of antique writing, Ms Kent. Now, tell me where the entrance to the private collection of Ms Pryor is located."
"I can't. Please!" Chrys' fingers were clenched into tight bundles behind her back, the nails pressing down so hard she thought she'd drawn blood from them.

"Not good enough, Ms Kent," Liao sighed. He reached for one of the other objects he'd taken from the stationary box, and held it up for Chrys' inspection before it flashed down out of sight, and her mind raced in panicked circles. 'Oh god! Is he going to cut me with those?!' She got her answer as the metallic snip-click sounded, and the nylon of her tights split apart under the pressure of the blades. He took his time, snipping small cuts that caused the nylon still on the tops of her feet to slowly shrink back up while he bared her soles. "I will ask again; where is the entrance?"
She screwed up her eyes, taking small breaths as she tried to bring the adrenaline spike caused by the noose's embrace and the man's work back under control. "I can't tell you, Mr Liao. Please, I'm begging you, just let me go."
His pale green eyes stared back at her, before he shook his head with an almost apologetic air. "I am afraid not, Ms Kent." He reached for the last object he'd taken from the box; a pen, and she began to babble as she saw it descend towards her soles like a vulture over fresh carrion. "Let me go, you mani-dammit!" She began to howl as he took the pen to her right foot's smallest toe. The nib seemed to float over her skin more than touch it, but she could feel the tackiness of the ink soaking into her skin anyway. Gasping back a choked breath, she managed to edge out the question that seemed more important than anything else to her, "Wha...what are you wr-...writing?"
"My name. I studied micro-calligraphy as a child, though human skin is a far cry from paper, I assure you."

"Just stop!" Tears were starting to trickle down her face now, the noose feeling like it was coiling tighter with every shuddering breath she swallowed desperately around the hoarse laughter, and her knees were starting to ache as the precious books perched under her ankles bent them upwards. His voice was as calm as a mountain next to her frenzied begging.
"As soon as you tell me where I can find Ms Pryor's collection, Ms Kent." Still, the pressure let up for just a moment, and she relaxed her muscles that had been so tensed from the unrelenting assault on her skin, resting her sore eyes. The silence was disturbed by the creak of a book that hadn't been opened in years, and the tear-streaked eyes flickered open again. Liao had the third volume open, one finger fastidiously tracing its way down the age-yellowed page. The pen appeared back in his hand, and he bent back down again. She couldn't even bring herself to beg anymore now, and her eyes closed up in frustration. She felt the pen touch down like a butterfly resting on the ball of her right foot, and his voice began to float out as he started to recite the same words he was writing on her sole. "Athens was the name..." His voice became mere background noise as the ink flowed forth, the words etching onto her skin for what felt like eternity.

"...survey of Pausanias..." the pen paused its meandering for just a moment. "Are you ready to tell me, Ms Kent?"
Her head bowed with exhaustion, her face beaded with sweat, she limply nodded. Liao stroked the pen down again, watching her face as she shuddered and brought it up. "I did not hear an answer, Ms Kent," he smiled warmly.
"...I will..." she murmured.
"I am glad to hear that. Now, where is it?"
Chrys' head began to nod again, until the scratch of the paperclip rasped down her arch. "Ah! It's...it's in her office."
The pen caressed her foot again, a few more words of the history of Athens committed to her skin. "You are being oddly co-operative now, Ms Kent. Why should I believe you?"
Her throat burned with the effort of talking as she began to beg. "It's the truth, I swear it!"
The pen leapt off her skin like a bird taking flight, and Chrys had never felt more relief before in her life. "Very well, Ms Kent. I regret that you chose not to inform me so earlier, because I must do this."
A strong, warm hand pressed under her ankles, lifting them upwards for a moment, and all she could do was watch like it was happening to a stranger, she was so exhausted. She couldn't even muster the energy to plead for clemency as Liao's other hand stacked the third volume on top of the other two, her ankles only sinking by a few millimetres as he let go and her heels touched the age-worn leather of the book.

"I am however, no barbarian," he smiled, but Chrys didn't reply. Her knees throbbed from the aching bend he'd forced on her legs, and still she sat quiet as he began to loosen the noose that had kept her upright. She felt like being little more than a silent audience to him now as he sketched a salute to her. "It was nice to meet you, Ms Kent. I pray for your sake we do not have to cross paths again." He left the distraught librarian behind him, the office door left wide open for someone to rescue her, as he made his way out into the main hall and to the staff-only wing of Ms Pryor's office. A hulking youth in a sports jersey and a face like an approaching thunderstorm turned the corner in front of him, uttering little more than an insincere apology. Liao nodded graciously with an equally false smile on his lips, stopping as he heard the brute call out to him. "Hey mister, have you seen that librarian about?"
He looked back over his shoulder, gazing at the younger male with dispassionate eyes. "Are you referring to a specific librarian?"
The student guffawed. "Yeah, the hottie with the rack," his voice dropped conspiratorially, "real nice, right?"
He paused to consider a reply, before a smile that unnerved the younger boy twinkled on his lips. "Actually, she is inside her office. I think she would welcome another visitor right now."
The taller male backed off slowly, "...okay. Thanks buddy!"

An hour's work was all it had taken to find the entrance into Ms Pryor's private sanctum and replace everything just as how it had been. The item he'd wanted had been trivial in its difficulty to find, and he'd wondered if Ms Pryor herself had been reading it. His path took him by the Head Librarian's office, but the book in his hands held all his attention. He never heard the muffled grunts, or saw the brutish male energetically ramming an oversized cock into Ms Kent's mouth, one hand tugging on the noose to encourage her. His eyes were raptly focused on the book and the inscription it bore on the front; 複雜處罰的腳. He'd spent so long searching for it, lost to his family decades ago. Perhaps tonight, he would celebrate, and the smile on his lips at the thought of it drove others out of his path rather than risk looking him in the eye.