She looked at the store from her vantage point nearly in the middle of the ground floor. The entire bookstore had this amazing almost gothic vibe going on—from the dark walls to the lack of windows in the back. It was authentic and moody. The kind of place where even if they stood in the same spot, no two people would get the same picture or even see the same thing. The dark walls shifted from black to slate gray to deep navy, depending on where you stood. Rinn still couldn’t say what color they really were.

It was also one of those old City Beautiful buildings. It had Roman-style coffers in the ceiling that created this rad three-dimensional pattern of square woodwork when you looked up. It had old, classical-style columns that ran from floor to ceiling—gigantic, fluted white pillars that were the only source of brightness in the entire space. And the second floor was a loft with a balcony, meaning that the entire first floor of the building was effectively two stories high. The second-story balcony was covered in fairy lights. And on the main floor, all the bookshelves were offset and formed this stunning radial pattern across the floor. The only right angles in the place were where the walls or the balconies met.

They even still sold penny candy and taffy and fancy, felt-tip pens by the register.

It couldn’t just close. Where would all the books go?

And Archer Hunt Junior—who owned the place—well, his dad had put up these wild art installations all around the place. There was a headless statue of a girl in roller skates installed so that she was hanging from the ceiling, over a set of stairs. And there was a tunnel of books, pinwheeling out from one of the walls. And somehow, he’d gotten an old bank-vault door up to the second story and put all the crime resale books in a vault. A vault.

This place was magical, and nobody really seemed to know about it anymore. Rinn didn’t understand it. Old Mr. Hunt, the current Mr. Hunt’s father, he had stipulated in his will that the bookstore was to remain a bookstore in perpetuity. It was supposed to stay in business for the community. Unless, of course, it was really becoming a hardship to keep open. As long as there were customers, Wild Nights was meant to stay open as a bookstore, and no sale of the land was allowed. Jo had told Rinn that once, right after she’d been hired.

And there was business, wasn’t there?

Rinn looked up at the balcony on the second floor. It was beautiful and haunted in the way that a space that holds worn, resale books can be—but was so often empty, when it should have been full of people snapping photos and giggling and picking up books and reading detective fiction in a freaking vault.