Nikolai turned, his eyes narrowing in annoyance at the unexpected interruption. He saw the waitress, the nonentity, standing there. He opened his mouth to issue a dismissive command, perhaps to tell her to get down before she got hurt. He never got the chance. Kate swung the bottle in a vicious arc, not like an amateur, but with her entire body behind it, aiming for the temple. Years of training guided the blow. Nikolai, despite his skill, was caught by surprise. He jerked his head back, but the bottle still connected with a sickening crunch against his jaw and cheekbone. The thick glass shattered, spraying vodka and shards everywhere. He staggered, blood already bright on the pale skin, and the room’s geometry broke open around that single crack.
What followed was not a brawl. It was a sequence Kate had not wanted to remember how to run. The man nearest the kitchen swung his suppressed pistol toward the bar. She was already gone from the line, down behind the marble, then out the service side with a skillet snatched from the pass. The first shot chewed wood where her head had been. She came in low, the iron catching his wrist, and the pistol skittered under a toppled chair. A tablecloth came off a neighboring table in the same motion, thrown not as a costume but as a blinding weight across the second man’s face and gun hand. A bar spoon, heavy and short, went into the soft place under a jaw when he clawed the cloth away. It was ugly, close, and faster than the training that had put him in the restaurant.
The pasta station gave her the next answer. Boiling water, lifted and thrown in a sheet, not to kill, but to make a man drop a weapon and scream. One of the crowd-control pair went down clutching his arm, the suppressor clattering across tile. Henderson, still on the floor with a ruined knee, saw enough to understand he had been wrong about the waitress, and not enough to help her. Finch stayed where he had been shoved, blood on his collar from flying glass, watching a woman in an apron dismantle the men who had dismantled his detail.
Nikolai recovered faster than the others. He got a patron up in front of him, an elderly man from the birthday table, and he put the remaining pistol to the man’s neck. Twenty feet of open floor. Kate had the dropped suppressor in her hand by then, slick with vodka and someone else’s blood. She did not negotiate. She put one round into Nikolai’s deltoid, the shoulder of the gun arm, and the weapon fell before the hostage did. Nikolai went to his knees. The last man still standing tried to run for the alley exit and met the fire extinguisher she had clocked on the way in. He did not get the door open.