It could have been anyone on that road that evening — someone with no badge in their pocket, no camera quietly recording, no department behind them ready to listen.
For most people who’d been stopped by Volkov over the years, it had simply ended the way it started: with an apology nobody meant, a slap on the wrist that changed nothing, and the quiet understanding that complaining wouldn’t do any good.
She thought about that delivery driver. That elderly woman. That teenager with the broken taillight. None of them had gotten justice at the time. It had taken her case cracking the door open before anyone even went back to look at theirs.
A month after it happened, Victoria drove down that same stretch of road again, on her way to another meeting on the other side of town.
She slowed automatically as she passed the spot on the shoulder where it had all taken place, some instinct making her glance at it in the mirror the way you glance at a scar. Nothing marked it, of course. Just an ordinary patch of gravel beside an ordinary field, the wheat a little taller now than it had been that evening.
