No price too high

Lasair didn't tell Bas of her nightly venture out to Fortune's shrine, this time of her own volition.

The last time she'd been forced to pay the toll, she'd made her most powerful cloak. It'd cost her nightmares that she woke from with her hands around Basileios' neck, but they were growing more manageable. If she could manage them, she could manage this. She bent over Fortune's copper bowl on their corruptive altar, asking what they wanted this time around with her jaw clenched.

Their voice came to her slowly, languid, knowing she'd paid before, glad she was back for more.
Give me something precious, Fortune demanded. Something irreplaceable.

Immediately her hand went to the necklace around her neck, feeling the weight of a god's attention on it along with a gleeful hunger. It wasn't asking for blood, but this might as well've been with how much it meant to her. He's gotten this for her on their first 'date' (if you could call manipulating an angry mob a date, which they both did), and given it to her as a means to fly freely if she needed it, its stone enchanted. She'd never get the moment back of when Basileios reassured her with this, never get back the beginning of her walls tearing down for her fiance, and Fortune knew that.

She backed away from the altar and fled.
The offering didn't have to come from her, after all.
Why should she have to pay for this when someone else could?

Basileios didn't have to know how she hired someone off the street to find something akin to what Fortune was looking for. He didn't have to know how callously she searched on her own, navigating her social circles to find her newest target. He didn't need to know how callously she found it in the shop of an innocent florist.

The florist couldn't even speak, which just drove home how pathetic this all was. She brushed away his need for a familiar to interpret, well-versed in sign language enough to order a bouquet large enough to distract his attention. She mirthlessly perused his shop in the meantime, finding sentimental objects and picking them up one by one, but it wasn't until she paused by the window that she found what she was looking for.

It was a book, innocently displayed on a wooden bookstand against gauzy curtains. She picked it up silently, flipping through its pages of detailed handwritten notes on flower language. It smelled of a woman's perfume, and the book plate was damning.

To my little hyacinth
From your loving mama
May your garden always be in bloom

Lasair turned to Orion who had her ordered bouquet in his arms, glass vase and all, and he gently set it down to explain to her with a wistful smile that the book was from his mother who had passed away.

She set the book back down softly, her fingers trailing over the cloth cover, and replied with a distant note in her voice, "You're lucky you can remember her fondly."

She left a generous payment, a fortune beyond the worth of the bouquet, and left behind her target on the back of the book, something her paid thief would recognize when he came around later that night to break in and take it, leaving not a trace of entry behind, nothing taken aside from the thing that mattered most.