He had signed the paperwork that sealed my name.

For six years he had watched a woman who deserved a public medal live as a nobody, unable to correct a single insult, unable to tell even her husband what she had done, because the law he served required her silence.

And now a spoiled heiress had torn the seal open herself, in front of four hundred witnesses, in her hunger to humiliate the very person she should have feared most.

Adebayo was not going to let that moment pass with anything less than the full weight of his office.

The salute was not protocol.

There is no regulation that requires a chief of police to salute a retired captain in a beach club.