Dmitri slammed a photograph on the counter. It showed a man with a scarred face and dead eyes. “This is Boris. You humiliated him in the underground cat-fighting league last year. You did not fight his cat. You gave his cat a… a bob cut.”

Zohan stood in the center of the salon, shears held loosely at his side. The three men were frozen—partly in pain, partly in sheer humiliation. Dmitri touched his new pink Mohawk and whimpered.

“You have made a mistake,” Zohan said softly. “You came to my place of peace. My sanctuary of snip-snip. And you threatened… the magic.”

“The cat looked fabulous,” Zohan said, finally turning. His eyes, warm and brown a moment ago, now held the flat calm of a man who’d once disarmed a missile with a bottle of Pantene.