The review board convened twice. Victoria was asked to testify both times, sitting in a plain room across the table from senior officers she’d worked alongside for years, walking them through the footage frame by frame, answering every question without embellishment.
She wasn’t there for revenge. She kept telling herself that, and she believed it. She was there because this was exactly the kind of thing her job existed to catch, and if she let it slide simply because it had happened to her personally, she’d have no right to hold anyone else to a different standard.
The tall officer — his name, it turned out, was Sergeant Igor Volkov, twelve years on the force — sat through his hearing with his arms crossed and very little to say.
When pressed, he tried the same explanation he’d offered on the roadside: that Victoria had been uncooperative, that he’d felt threatened, that force had been necessary to control the situation. The board played the footage.
