It did not take long for Dulciana to deploy Ana-Cristina to intercept me, but I'd expected as much. I was in her way again, now that I was very inconveniently alive.

I'd finished my breakfast in silence, the room finally tilting to a stop around me now that there was food in my belly. I left the empty dining room, finding my way back outside into the sunshine, wondering which royal sibling would be the first to accost me. The king's shouting fury had echoed through the royal tower, confirming my suspicions that Frederico wouldn't be the first, not if he was aiding his father in disciplining Armando.

My second guess had been the correct one. Perched beside one of the fountains in the garden just outside my tower, Ana-Cristina had changed from the dress she'd worn to breakfast, now garbed in an enticing concoction of shimmering sapphire, accenting her narrow waist and ample bosom.

A pretty, gift-wrapped princess, sent to get rid of me as a threat to Dulciana's throne.

"Are you all right?" Ana-Cristina asked, setting down the book of love poetry she'd been flipping through in an attempt to act nonchalant.

I smirked, but kept walking.

I wanted to see how desperately Dulciana wanted me out of her way.

As expected, Ana-Cristina hurried to catch up to me, calling out for me to wait. I ignored her, already three steps up towards my suite when she caught my arm.

"I thought I'd offer you a palace tour to cheer you up," she said, breathless from having run in such a tight corset to catch me.

This again, I thought. Did she only have one trick to woo her suitors? The dangerous smirk still graced my face when I turned to face her.

"Perhaps some other time," I said, pulling my arm from her grasp.

"I heard what happened," she said, stilling my feet as I climbed. I turned to her, ice and stone in my gaze. She swallowed and I fought to keep from laughing.

Mother's glare worked so well on strangers.

"I'm very happy you're alive," she continued warily, before slipping back into her role of seductress. "I thought I'd show you something that could help you, if ever you found yourself in such a situation again..."

Such a situation. Did she mean the poison or the assassins? My thoughts jumped immediately to the empty glass vial of rosy liquid, now sitting in my jacket pocket. If she was about to show me where the royal family kept their supply of panacea, it would be a mistake to turn her down. But after last night's events, I didn't trust her not to be leading me into yet another trap.

"Come," she said, reaching for my hand again. I twitched it out of her reach.

"If you really know what happened last night, you'll understand why I'm disinclined to follow you, or any member of your family," I said, nothing friendly in my tone. She swallowed again, but persisted.

Dulciana wanted me out of the way very badly, it seemed.

"I want to help you protect yourself," she said. "We have quite the number of poisons to choose from, some that would be enough to fell an attacker with a simple puff of powder."

The attackers in the alley, that was the attempt on my life that she knew about. Interesting, considering it was the one that Dulciana could most easily distance herself from by explaining it away as a random attack by disgruntled commoners.

Which had me wondering whether Ana-Cristina knew anything about any of Dulciana's plans...

"Did you know that she's planning on selling you to one of the duques to back her claim to the throne?" I asked.

At that, Ana-Cristina recoiled, her mask slipping away as alarm spread across her face.

"What?" she demanded, taking a step back from me.

Time to test how far this princess would go for her sister, I thought, or how much she really knew about Dulciana's plotting. If my memory served me correctly, Dulciana and Armando had offered Ana-Cristina's hand to the Duque Delminas' son, Guillermo Peñarisco, in exchange for the duque's loyalty. The king, however, had already promised her to the unsavoury son of Francisco Barcolino, the Duque Delmar.

"You were never meant for me, were you?" I said, prowling towards her. "You were meant for the Barcolino boy."

The breath left her in a gasp, her shoulders hunching inwards as if I'd punched her with my words. My words were lies, but meant to confirm whether or not Dulciana had shared her plan, whether Ana-Cristina knew that her sister had promised her as a bride for Guillermo Peñarisco, not the Barcolino boy.

The terror on her face said she had no idea.

"No," she said, more to herself than to me. "No, that's not possible."

"Isn't it?" I demanded, continuing my advance even as she backed away from me. "You have never been more than a bargaining chip to them."

A strategic choice of word, "them." All the better to keep her guessing about whom I was referring to - her older sister or her father. Ana-Cristina's eyes flashed with angry determination as they met mine.

"No," she said, rage mingling with desperation in her face. "Not Dulciana. She'd never do such a thing."

Gotcha, I thought.

I'd heard enough. Enough to know that Ana-Cristina was still not aware of Dulciana's plan for her, that she still thought she had some sort of say in her future. That was the knowledge I needed to execute the plan that had swiftly taken form in my head the moment I'd noticed her seated by that fountain.

If Dulciana intended to use Ana-Cristina to distract me, my best defence against any further attempts on my life was to play along. If I kept her thinking that I still found Ana-Cristina enticing, perhaps I wouldn't be dosed with more poison or accosted in a darkened hallway.

Play along I would, but I didn't plan to play fair. It was high time someone sowed some dissent in the murderous princess' ranks. Where better to start than with the pawn of a princess who didn't yet know her sister's intentions for her.

"I'd never do such a thing, either," I said, injecting as much heat and passion into my gaze as I could muster. It wasn't difficult, pretending to be attracted to the beautiful princess, but I needed her to believe me for my plan to work.

Which was why I layered on yet more deception.

I closed the space between us in one step, lifting a hand to caress her cheek while experimentally resting the other on her waist. She'd gone rigid, clearly not expecting such a move on my part, but she didn't push away, she didn't fight me. Instead, she blinked away the surprise from her face, the mask of seductress snapping back into place.

"Come away with me," I whispered, dropping my lips tantalizingly close to hers. "Leave this palace, where they'd sell you to buy their thrones. You deserve so much more than what they have planned for you."

The quiver of her eyebrows, the flash of doubt in her eyes, had me hoping that it had worked.

Her lips on mine confirmed it.

Ana-Cristina was the one who had tiptoed up to kiss me, closing the space I'd left between us. To her credit, she tried very hard, but it was still rather anti-climactic to discover that she was a terrible kisser. She, however, clearly thought she'd done a spectacular job, her lips curving with a sensuous little smile when she broke away.

I smiled in return, though not at all for the reason she thought. She thought that she had the upper hand again. She thought that she'd been able to sway me from walking away into kissing her. She thought that she still held my heart in her hand, that I truly wanted to run away with her.

She thought that she'd succeeded in capturing me, which meant that I'd succeeded in duping her.

"Come," she said, slipping her hand into mine with a sultry gaze that a lesser man would've followed to the ends of the earth. "Let me help protect you."

I rolled my eyes the moment she turned away from me, tugging me towards the entrance hall.

We descended into the cliffside, sneaking through hallways I had never seen before, coming to a stop before a heavy door with a massive lock. Ana-Cristina released me to dig for something in her bodice, not turning away to ensure that I watched. I did, once again fighting from rolling my eyes.

It seemed the only seductive tricks she knew were the usual ones.

"We'll choose something that will help if you're attacked," she said, pushing the door open and slipping through, "And something that will help if you ever find yourself poisoned."

At that, the tiniest bit of guilt bloomed inside me. What if she truly was attempting to help me? What if she believed me and wanted to leave this palace with me, to escape the plans her father and sister had for her?

The pragmatic part of me squashed the guilt.

Ana-Cristina's fate was not mine to decide. I had a job to do, which was to ensure that Dulciana did not ascend the throne. In some other life, a life where a power-hungry, murderous maniac was not poised to be crowned queen of a country not allied with mine, perhaps I would've concerned myself with Ana-Cristina's fate. But not now, not when stealing her away would spell doom for Pretania.

Besides, for all I knew, she wasn't about to gift me with panacea. She didn't know that I was already familiar with the rosy pink antidote, so perhaps she'd try to bestow upon me something that would hasten my death rather than save my life.

I followed her in, wondering if she knew that she'd just set herself a test of her loyalty to me. When we rounded a corner in the stone hallway, however, I paused, my mind grinding to a halt.

The walls of the hallway were lined with glass bottles, each a different colour, lit from behind so they glowed with an eerie, otherworldly light. The sight of it summoned a memory, foggy like the others that I'd recalled that morning, but clear enough for me to realize that I'd been here before.

I'd stumbled through this very hallway last night, supported by my rescuer.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Ana-Cristina said, running an appreciative eye over the poisons. The hallway curved away before us, sloping gently downwards, row after row of glass bottles on display. Some large, some small, some full, some half empty.

"Are they all different?" I asked, leaning closer to inspect one. A small, handwritten card sat beside each bottle, but Ana-Cristina took my hand, pulling me deeper down the hallway before I could read what any of them said.

"Yes, but those aren't the ones I wanted to show you," she said, leading me deeper into the poison gallery. "These are child's play compared to the others."

The hallway was eerily silent, save for our echoing footsteps as we descended deeper into the mountain the palace sat upon, the passage becoming less like a hallway and more like a tunnel. It curved sharply before finally levelling out onto a stone floor.

When her feet hit the stone, Ana-Cristina froze.

A man stood before the nearest wall of poisons, the multi-coloured light from the backlit glass dancing across his face. When he glanced towards us, Ana-Cristina dropped my hand.

"Somebody's been a bad little girl," Frederico said, turning his attention back to the wall of poisons before him. "Give me the key, please."

**A/N: *sing-song voice* Somebody's in trou-ble! So what do you think of Ana-Cristina? Trying to help Thomas, or still acting on Dulciana's orders? **