8. Snow

~Kiara~

“Mr. Sterling.”

I’d been replaying my own voice since the night before and I still didn’t know why I’d said it like that.

It was the right thing to do. I told myself that on a loop until it almost sounded true.

By morning, the villa had already moved on without me.

A production assistant herded all twenty of us toward the terrace for breakfast together.

A long table was dressed in white line and there were fruits stacked into towers nobody would actually eat.

The cameras were mounted on every visible surface.

I sat between Maya and Tinsley, mostly to avoid Chloe, who had spent the entire walk over shooting me looks sharp enough to draw blood.

“Sleep well?” Tinsley asked under her breath.

“Barely.”

“Yeah.”

I was two bites into a croissant I didn’t want when I heard shouting from behind the catering tent, off to the side where none of the cameras were pointed.

“Someone help her! She’s not breathing right!”

Before I knew it, I was on my feet and hurrying across the terrace. I didn’t even care if it was appropriate or if there was a penalty for it.

It was one of the runners who was a production assistant, maybe twenty-two, sprawled on the ground behind the tent with two crew members hovering uselessly over her.

Her lips had gone faintly blue while her chest pulled in short, useless gasps that weren’t reaching anywhere near her lungs.

“Move back,” I said, already on my knees beside her, tilting her chin to check her airway. “Has she eaten anything today? Any allergies?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know—” one of the crew stammered.

“Then find out. Now.”

I pressed two fingers to her throat, counting.

She had a fast but weak pulse. It signaled something obstructing, but it was not a panic attack.

“She was eating shrimp ten minutes ago,” someone finally offered.

Anaphylaxis. I didn’t have time to feel relieved at having an answer.

“Epi-pen. Now. Inform the on-site medic, tell them anaphylactic reaction.”

My hands were already moving through her bag, finding the auto-injector zipped into a side pocket exactly where someone who knew her own allergy would keep it.

I uncapped it and pressed it to her thigh without hesitation.

I counted the seconds, and didn’t look up until her breathing started to even out beneath my hands.

By the time the medic arrived, she was pale but breathing.

She blinked up at the sky like she had forgotten where she was.

“You just saved her life,” the medic said, checking vitals. He was impressed. “Nice work. You a nurse?”

“Physical therapist,” I said. “You don’t forget CPR or epi-pen training, no matter what you specialise in.”

I didn’t notice the camera until I stood up.

It had been angled toward the catering tent for a promotional B-roll shot, the operator told me later, apologetic.

Half of the crew hadn’t even realised it was rolling live to the production feed the whole time.

Which was exactly why, twenty minutes later, it was everywhere.

I was back at the table.

“Kiara. Kiara.” Maya tackled me at the breakfast table, her phone already thrust in my face. “Do you know what’s trending right now?”

“Maya, where did you even get a phone? They took everyone’s on the first night.”

“Shh.” She glanced around, guilty. “I smuggled a second one in my toiletry bag. Don’t judge me, half the girls did it. Just look.”

My name filled her screen, paired with a dozen captions like;

“Not here to flirt, here to save lives.”

“I loved her the moment she won the seduction challenge!”

“America’s new Favourite contestant.”

“Four million views, Kiara. Under an hour,” Maya exclaimed, again.

I stared at the number until it stopped making sense.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had always felt like a mountain I had to climb one desperate day at a time.

For the first time, it felt like something reachable…

I didn’t get long to sit with it when a production assistant appeared at Maya’s shoulder so fast she must have been watching the whole table, and plucked the phone straight out of Maya’s hand without so much as an apology.

“Contraband devices are confiscated on sight. You know the rules.”

The assistant’s tone was flat, bored, like this happened at least once a day. “You’re lucky it’s just the phone and not a formal strike.”

Maya went pale and didn’t argue, which told me this wasn’t the first warning she’d had.

I glanced sideways at Tinsley, who hadn’t so much as looked up from her plate through the entire exchange.

Whatever phone she was hiding…she had clearly gotten a lot better at it than Maya had.

I filed that thought away next to everything else about Tinsley I didn’t have an explanation for yet.

I was still staring after the assistant’s retreating back when Tinsley leaned in close.

“I have something to tell you,” she said, “but you need to walk with me. After this.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me.”

She found me thirty mins later behind the pool house, out of camera range.

It was a blind spot the crew hadn’t bothered wiring, since nothing back there was considered good television.

She glanced once over her shoulder before pulling something from her pocket and pressing it into my hand.

It was a plain key card.

“Everyone in this house knows roughly where the Bachelor’s private floor is,” Tinsley said quietly. “It’s the worst-kept secret in the villa. Nobody can get up there, though.”

“Where did you get this?”

“It fell out of that runner’s bag. The one you just saved.”

Tinsley’s eyes flicked toward the main house, specifically the wing none of us were supposed to go near.

“The same runner who’s met privately with Chloe twice since we landed in Hawaii.”

My stomach slowly twisted.

“Tinsley… what are you saying?”

“I’m saying Chloe is connected to the runner who has access to the Bachelor. And somehow…” She hesitated, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Chloe is connected to the Bachelor.”

Before I could hand the card back, she pressed it firmly into my palm and curled my fingers around it.

“Why? This has nothing to do with me…”

“Well… I just think the Bachelor is already smitten with you, so I wanted to help you out.”

“I…”

Words failed me.

Behind us, a producer’s voice rang out across the terrace, calling every contestant back for an announcement.

Tinsley’s expression shifted instantly. “Rose Ceremony’s tonight,” she said. “Guess we’ll find out who’s going home.”

She walked off before I could ask her anything else, leaving me standing there with a stolen key in my fist and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with it.

I was still staring at the suite number scrawled on the tape when Mateo came jogging around the corner of the pool house. His phone was held up in his hand.

“Kiara. It’s your grandmother.”

He was slightly out of breath, glancing between me and the screen.

“She called my line.”

He pressed the phone into my hand before I could ask anything else, then took a few steps back to give me space.

At the same time, he scanned the terrace for any producer who might wander too close.

“There’s my girl.” Granny’s voice crackled faintly through the connection. “I only have a minute, sweetheart, she’s napping and I don’t want to wake her. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

My stomach dropped straight through the ground.

“How is she?” I whispered, glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one was close enough to hear.

“Perfect. Wanted to know this morning if the ocean on the television was the same ocean you were standing in.”

I laughed, tears almost flowing.

She paused. “She misses you, baby.”

“Tell her,” I said, my throat tightening, “tell Snow mummy will be home soon.”

“I always do,” Granny said and added. “I have to go, sweetheart. Be careful out there. And Kiara… whatever’s happening with that man on your television screen, you let your heart decide when it’s ready not the cameras.”

The line went dead before I could ask how she already knew.