I’d had no idea what life or love was.

Life didn’t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once—when I’d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they’d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they’d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other’s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths.

I began telling Dani about my parents. About what life had been like growing up in a happy home in the Deep South. About magnolia-scented days and sultry heat, slow-paddling fans and pool parties. She stilled in my arms. After a while, she stopped crying and leaned back on the couch, staring at me like a stray cat with its nose pressed to the window of a restaurant.

When she took off for the abbey, I carefully tucked the photo album the LM had tossed on the couch into my backpack, unopened. I knew without cracking the cover I was going to need time to pore over the pictures, a luxury I didn’t have now.

I headed off into the gray drizzly day for Barrons Books and Baubles.

I detoured past Chester’s on the way there, hoping the Gray Woman might be in the vicinity. I was going to spend a lot of time loitering in the streets outside Ryodan’s club. “Inside his club” might be under his protection, but that didn’t mean the surrounding area wasn’t free range.

I walked quietly, tensed for battle, prepared to slam my palms into the hag: Null and stab her and do a victory dance on her gruesome body. But the only Unseelie I encountered on the way to the bookstore were Rhino-boys. Half a dozen of them. And what they were doing confounded me so thoroughly that I ended up walking down the cobbled street, spear sheathed, hands in my pockets, staring at them while they stared at me. I think we all had big what-the-fucks plastered all over our faces. It’s kind of hard to tell with those beady eyes and tusks, but I know I did.

They were rewiring the streetlamps and carefully resetting them in the sidewalks. They were sweeping up debris. They were replacing bulbs. They had brooms and jackhammers, wiring materials, wheelbarrows, and concrete.

I was supposed to kill them. That was what I did, what I was made for.

But they were putting Dublin back to rights.

I wanted Dublin back to rights. Did this mean they were working to restore the power, too?

“Are you doing it to keep the Shades out?” I shook my head at the oddity of having just initiated a conversation with a Rhino-boy I would have wondered if my day could get any stranger, but my days always get stranger.

“Pigs,” one of them grunted, and the rest of them agreed, snorting. “Eat everything. Leave nothing for the rest of us.”

“I see.” I decided I would let them finish cleaning up the block first and kill them on my way back. Hands in my pockets, I resumed walking.

“Pretty girlie-girl, want to live forever?” one of them grunted at my back. They all snorted and snuffled as if at some inside joke. Like, duh, maybe eating them in exchange for sex really didn’t give you immortality, just some new, never-before-heard-of Fae STD. “Got something you can suck on, girlie-girl.”

Ew. “Not a chance,” I said coolly.

They should have let me go. I would have let them go. But Rhino-boys aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box. I heard hoofed feet shuffling, moving toward me. Their bribe hadn’t worked, so they were switching tactics to brute force. They’d picked the wrong woman to mess with. I hate Unseelie.

“Think twice,” I warned.

I suspect Rhino-boys have a hard enough time thinking once.

A few moments later, the six of them were dead and I was walking toward BB&B, thoroughly pissed that I’d had to kill them before they finished wiring the lamps.

The last look I’d gotten at the bookstore was late in the afternoon on that hellish Halloween that would forever be burned into my memory as the second-worst night of my life. All the exterior lights had been broken out. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I turned down the street I’d once considered my “way home.”

I stopped, stared, and smiled faintly. Of course.

On a street of heavily damaged and looted buildings, BB&B alone stood untouched. The elegantly restored façade of the Old World four-story brick building was immaculate. The spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides, which had been broken out last I saw it, were now replaced. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES had been rehung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elaborate brass pole, and it creaked as it swung in the drizzly breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned green-tinted windows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the bookstore’s grand alcoved entrance. Ornate cherry diamond-paned doors, nestled between limestone columns, gleamed in the light.

I wondered if the bookstore meant something to him, that he’d gone to such lengths. Did it hold sentimental value? Or was it merely his possession, his statement to the world in general that nothing and no one would ever take what was his?

I stepped into the alcove, tried the door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open.

I never tire of my first glimpse of my shop. Once you get past the immediate sense of spatial distortion—as if you’ve opened the door of an old-fashioned phone booth only to find the Library of Congress inside—you notice that luxury and comfort have never gone so effortlessly hand in hand.

The main room is about eighty feet long by sixty feet wide and vaults five stories to a muraled ceiling. On the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors, bookcases line each wall from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, catwalks permit access, while ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.

But it’s the first floor I spend so much time on, with its freestanding bookcases crammed with all the latest, greatest reads standing tall on polished wood floors scattered with plush rugs. Two seating cozies, fore and aft, boast opulent yet comfy chesterfield sofas and brocaded chairs topped by soft throws, centered around my beloved respite from the Dublin rain and cold—fancy enameled gas fireplaces.

I glanced at my well-stocked magazine rack (sadly out of date) and my cashier’s counter. I smiled at the old-fashioned register with the tiny silver bell that tinkled whenever the drawer popped open.