The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) by Gregory Ashe Page B

bullet snagged Irene’s sleeve, and another whizzed past her ear like an angry bee, and then silence.
    Cian let out a muffled oath. Irene looked over.
    For a moment, she had to squeeze her eyes shuts.
    The hand was clutching his leg. Just a hand. No arm. The severed hand was tight around Cian’s muscular calf, clamped down like a tourniquet, and when Irene opened her eyes, the hand was still there. Pain and fear wrote themselves large on Cian’s face as he pried at the fingers. He couldn’t seem to get them loose.
    Irene crawled over to him, pulling and clawing at the hand, but the fingers were like iron. The hand flexed, tightened, and Cian’s gave a quiet gasp. Irene set her revolver against the back of the hand. Cian shook his head, but she couldn’t tell if it was the pain or an attempt to tell her no. The bullet might pass through the hand and into his leg.
    Sloshing steps came from the doorway.
    The hand on Cian’s leg tightened, and this time Cian grunted. Irene shifted the angle of the gun, setting the barrel against the base of the index finger, lining the shot up so that the bullet would tear through the fingers and strike the floor.
    Cian nodded.
    She squeezed the trigger.
    Severed fingers toppled to the ground. With a shaky hand, Cian brushed off the rest of the hand. Dark stains—mud, Irene thought, before blocking the word—marred his trousers. Irene raised herself on her knees.
    And then she heard the scream.
    The first note was pure surprise, before it deepened and widened into true terror. There was a flurry of gunfire. Cian grabbed Irene’s hand and hauled her towards the back of the bar. She glanced over her shoulder. She knew she’d regret it for the rest of her life.
    A scruffy little bird of a man was suspended in the air by one of the men in trench coats. The scruffy man struck twice with his empty gun. The other men had pulled back, holding their fire and waiting for a clean shot. One of them noticed Irene and Cian and fired once.
    Irene barely heard the shot. What she saw, instead, was the trench-coat man grip the scruffy man by one arm and one leg and then rip him in half. There was a spray of red mist, wet, glistening coils falling to splatter against the floor, and a flash like sheet lightning inside Irene’s head as the world went white.
    The cold air revived her. She found herself in a dark alley, ice crackling under her feet as Cian held her around the waist and dragged her around a pile of rotting garbage. Irene fumbled at his hand, and Cian stopped and let her go. She braced herself against the wall. The brick clung to her hands like two icy kisses.
    She vomited, wiped her mouth, and vomited again.
    Cian waited.
    Irene wiped her mouth again, then pulled a handkerchief from her clutch, cleaned her fingers, and dried her eyes. She put the revolver away along with the handkerchief. And then she turned to look at Cian.
    Those pretty, blue-green glass eyes were calm. Almost understanding.
    “Whatever are you waiting for?” Irene said. “Don’t you have another crime to flee?”
    “I thought I was your prisoner,” he said, risking an almost smile.
    “I think there are other people more interested in you. You’d better hurry.”
    He didn’t move though. He just stood there.
    “Go on. Go.”
    “Are you ok?” he asked. “You don’t look ok.”
    Irene realized her eyes were watering in the cold. Or she was crying. Her brain couldn’t seem to tell which. She dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief again. “What a thing to say.”
    This time he did smile, and it was the same small, quiet smile. The smile of a man who’d been beaten for smiling too often. The smile of a man who had only ever stumbled across smiles in refuse bins. It broke something in Irene’s heart and kept on breaking it.
    “That—what he did—he tore that man in half,” Irene said.
    “I know. I saw. I’m sorry.”
    “You didn’t do it, did you? Kill Sally, I mean.”
    He shook his head.
    Irene