She Told the Mafia Boss His Haircut Was Boring—He Folded His Arms and Said, “Fix It.”

Harper Lane knew the haircut was boring. The difficult part was deciding whether telling Aleandro Vitali that information was worth becoming the most discussed barber in the city by sunset. She stood behind him with a comb in one hand, scissors in the other, and approximately six people pretending they were not waiting to hear what she would say.

Aleandro sat in the black leather barber chair, facing the enormous mirror, dark shirt beneath the cape, strong shoulders, tattoo visible above the collar near his neck, another trace of ink disappearing beneath one rolled sleeve where the cape had shifted. His beard was immaculate. His hair was thick, dark, professionally maintained, and painfully predictable. Harper lifted

the front with her comb, let it fall, turned his head slightly, studied the side, then the other. Aleandro watched every movement through the mirror. He had been watching her from the moment she draped the cape around his shoulders. Not nervously, not suspiciously, just closely. Like he was accustomed to knowing precisely what people were doing around him. Harper was

accustomed to difficult clients, actors, businessmen, grooms 2 hours before weddings, men who arrived holding photographs of 20-year-old versions of themselves, and somehow expected scissors to reverse time. She could handle difficult. What she had never handled before was a client whose arrival caused an entire luxury barberh shop to behave as though someone important had entered a courtroom. The

receptionist had straightened. One barber had lowered his voice. Another had abruptly remembered something in the back room. And the handsome man sitting near the window, Marco Vitali, apparently Aleandro's cousin, had watched Harper accept the appointment with the subtle concern of someone witnessing a woman test electrical wiring with a fork. Harper had noticed.