A few people in the department treated her differently after that — a little warier, a little more careful about how they spoke around her, as though she might be recording every conversation now, quietly building a file on all of them too.
She understood the instinct even if it stung a little. But far more people came up to her in the weeks that followed to say, quietly, that they were glad someone had finally done something about Volkov — that stories about him had been circulating for years, that people had complained before and nothing had
ever come of it, that it had taken this, a random stop on an empty road, a woman who happened to carry the one kind of identification that could actually hold him accountable, for the whole thing to finally break open.
That was the part that stayed with Victoria longest, more than the fear she’d felt with her cheek pressed against the cold metal of her own car door, more than the ache in her wrists afterward. It wasn’t really about her.
