The silence in the car made her thoughts louder.
She saw Ghost’s eyes, dark and steady. Heard the low scrape of his voice when he said her name. Felt the press of his mouth against hers like it had just happened. She missed him. God, she missed him. Not just his touch, his whole presence. His steadiness. How he looked at her directly and never turned away.
The car slowed, turning uphill toward her building. Rachel paid without looking up. Shouldered her bag. Stepped out into the quiet. The night should’ve welcomed her. Instead, it pressed in, close and unfamiliar.
She climbed the steps one by one, heart heavier than it had been even in Kabul. Her key hovered in the lock. She hesitated. Afghanistan might’ve been half a world away, but it clung to her skin like smoke.
So did Logan. Every part of him lived in her now. The steadiness. The heat. The silence that said everything. He’d never asked her to stay, but he hadn’t told her to go either.
She turned the key. Stepped into her apartment. The door closed behind her with a soft, final click. She was back, but the part of her that mattered, the part that remembered what it felt like to be seen and held and wanted, was still somewhere in the dark. With him.
23
San Diego - Rachel’s Apartment
It started small the morning after she got home. A headline she barely noticed. Some fringe blog with a name she didn’t recognize, tossing out her name like a spark in a dry forest.
At first, she ignored it, clickbait, manufactured controversy. But then another appeared, then two more. By the fifth headline, her pulse was racing. By the tenth, her screen was covered in words that made her stomach drop.
Rachel Parker: A Fraud?
Sources Claim Fabrication in War Reporting
The Journalist Who Lied Her Way to the Front Lines
She stared, hands frozen on the keyboard. The accusations weren’t vague. They were surgical.
Edited footage, snippets cut and twisted to look like deception. Headlines using words like “disgraced,” “unverified,” “manipulative.” Claims from anonymous colleagues she didn’t recognize. Testimonies she’d never given. Interviews she’d never attended.
By the third day, the fake profiles spread like infection, using her name and face to post inflammatory content, threads sewn into the timeline just believable enough to blur the truth.
The timing was no coincidence. She hadn’t published a single line of the story. Hadn’t submitted the photos. The footage was still locked away on the drive in her safe. And still… the fire had started in preparation for what she might do. They were trying to discredit her before she could publish what she saw.
Rachel slammed the laptop shut. The snap echoed through the apartment, sharp and final. She sat back, breathing hard. Her palms pressed into her face, trying to hold back the rising tide of fury and panic crawling up her throat.
She’d spent years crawling through the dirt with nothing but a pen and camera, carving truth out of rubble and ruin. She’d been shot at, shelled, detained, ignored, but not broken. Until now. This hit different. Because it was silent. Targeted. Precision warfare dressed in hashtags and headlines.
She pushed back from the desk and started pacing, steps fast and sharp on the hardwood floor. The smear hadn’t spread, it had detonated. Like someone had been sitting with their finger on the trigger, just waiting for her to land.
Her mind raced. There’d been no leak. She hadn’t shared the footage. Hadn’t made a call. The drive was untouched. So how the hell had they known?
The answer came fast. Someone had seen her that night in Afghanistan. Someone had followed her. And someone with power, real, connected, untouchable power, had decided she needed to be buried before she ever stepped into the light.
Her eyes drifted toward her phone, still sitting beside the bed. Logan’s number stared back at her from the favorites list, like it was waiting. She could almost hear his voice, calm but sharp, asking her what she needed, demanding the truth without letting her dodge.
God, she wanted to call him, but he was still in the field, still embedded with a team who could be caught in the fallout. If this went as deep as she feared…Her pulse kicked harder. He could already be in danger.
She grabbed the phone, held it in her palm, then shoved it into her pocket.
Instead, she reopened her laptop. Her fingers moved fast, precise. She pulled up old contacts, journalists she trusted, editors who owed her favors, former sources from hostile zones and Capitol basements. People who understood what happened when a journalist got too close to the truth.
If they wanted to silence her, she’d be louder. If they tried to bury the truth, she’d dig it out with her bare hands.
More alerts pinged across her screen. More headlines. More lies, but under all the noise, something shifted. A pulse in the current. Some people were starting to ask questions.
The officers behind the deal, whoever they were, had moved fast. Ruthless. Coordinated, but they’d miscalculated one thing: Rachel wasn’t new to war. And this smear campaign? It wasn’t deterrence. It was confirmation that she was right and they were afraid.
Journalists she hadn’t spoken to in years started reaching out, some cautious, some curious. Twitter feeds split in two. #RachelParkerLies trended beside #WeStandWithRachel. A digital trench war, fought in comments and retweets and 280-character declarations.
