Of Iron and Elder Wood

The bell over the door was an old brass swallow that sang when the glass swung inward. He liked the sound it made—clear, small, and contained. It was a promise of boundaries, a thread between him and the world he had chosen to let in. On the windowsill, a row of succulents soaked in winter light, and beyond the fogged glass, Bleecker Street moved through its morning rituals. He had learned the rhythms quickly: the dog walkers, the joggers, the baker across the way who set out trays that steamed in the chill, and the antique dealers who pretended not to look into his windows as they passed.

Grimmauld’s Repose had started as a joke whispered to an empty flat. It remained etched on the awning in curling gold script anyway, a private bit of honesty disguised as quaint branding. Inside, the shop felt like a long exhale. The walls were painted a dark grey that absorbed the light and softened it; carved shelves lined with spines kept strict order without looking like they did. A Persian rug that had seen three continents covered creaking boards. The front counter was a salvaged bank teller’s desk he’d sanded by hand. The subtle ward in the baseboard hummed when he rested his palm there.

He placed a leather-bound volume on a display stand and let his fingers linger. The book thrummed with a familiar, gentle heat; he had coaxed a crumbling binding back to life the night before with a single, silent word. It wasn’t much. It never was anymore. He had come to appreciate the smallness of certain magics, the way they folded quietly into the day instead of blasting holes through it. A lark perched in his chest lifted its head, but did not sing. Not here. Not now.

When the bell rang, he looked up with the polite smile he’d practiced in the mirror. The first customer of the day was a woman with silver hair braided into a crown and a tote bag full of mystery novels. She smelled faintly of rain and citrus. “Is this new?” she asked, tapping the glass of the case where a silver locket lay on black velvet, dull with age and something else.

“New to me,” he said, and his smile was genuine now. She stood close enough that her warmth reached him. He watched her consider the case, watched the lines at the corner of her mouth soften. “It keeps bad dreams away if you keep it under your pillow,” he added, voice even. “Or so I’m told.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Does it work?”

“For some people. For others—not even warm milk helps.” The line drew a laugh that landed gently between them. She browsed the shelves for an hour, leaving with three obscure histories and a promise to bring him a book of crossword puzzles she swore would stump anyone. When she left, the bell sang. He held onto the sound.

Most days stretched like that, unbroken and kind. He swapped a stack of poetry for a box of vinyl with a college student who took photographs of everything. He found a place on a high shelf for a jar of fountain pens. He drank tea that cooled too quickly and re-warmed it with the smallest flare of heat at his fingertips. He made a point of touching every spine as he shelved, grounding himself in the texture and shape of the work he chose, this deliberate, human curation. The city moved around him without asking for more than taxes and quiet compliance. It was almost enough.

Sometimes, when the shop was empty, he went to the back and washed his hands. He would roll back his sleeves—careful cuffs, neat habits—and watch the water slide over the lines of his wrists. Old scars stood out pearly and thin in the fluorescent light. He focused on the sensation: the precise temperature, the slickness of the soap, the way his knuckles ached if he pressed them into the sink’s edge. His reflection met his eyes without pity or accusation. He looked, he supposed, like a man in his early thirties who read too much and slept irregularly. The truth of him sat quiet as a stone under the skin, unmoving.

At night, he swept. He had never stopped finding comfort in broom bristles against wood. The sound and the rhythm were a mantra. Dust gathered at the edges of the rug, and he coaxed it into a tidy pile, banishing it with a flick into the bin. Later, he’d lock the front door with the ancient key he’d charmed to resist being copied, and the wards would rise, a veil as thin and strong as silk. He did not need them. He set them anyway. He breathed easier when the shop sighed into stillness.

On Saturdays, he wrote little notes in the margins of the price tags. Ask me about the ships at Alexandria. Cleaned and rebound with care. Once held by, probably, a bored scholar. The notes made customers smile. They made him feel like he could still speak in a voice that didn’t command or confess. When a child wandered in with an adult, he lowered himself to their level and pointed out the dragon carved into the leg of the desk, the way the wood grain resembled feathers if you squinted. He knew better than to call the dragon by name.

Occasionally, stray magic slipped out of him like a breath. A stuck window eased. A cracked teacup knit together when his thumb rubbed the rim in slow circles. A paper cut refused to break skin. Each time he felt the tug—subtle, inevitable—he pulled back. He had learned restraint in the way a desert learns shade. It wasn’t martyrdom; it was a choice. That mattered.

He slept upstairs in a narrow flat that smelled faintly of cloves and ink. The bed was a simple frame in dark wood, the mattress firm. He kept the curtains open to the bitter winter sky and the shifting glow of the city’s restless heart. In the quiet between three and four, the street below fell into a deeper hush. He listened to it like a prayer. Some nights he woke with his hand pressed hard over his chest, breath locked in his lungs, the darkness pressed close against his eyes. He would lie still, counting heartbeats, waiting for the old ache to pass. When it did, he rolled onto his side and stared at the doorway, listening for footsteps he knew would not come.

By day, he catalogued. He oiled hinges. He replaced bulbs. He learned the names of the regulars and their dogs: Muriel with the beagle, Tom who always bought used biographies, Alia who ran the café down the block and brought him pastries he pretended not to like. He let the normalcy wrap around him until the last of his edges felt sanded down. He taught himself how to breathe without bracing for an explosion, how to stand without reaching for a wand out of habit. The holly and phoenix feather lived in a velvet-lined drawer under the counter. He rested his hand there sometimes when a customer asked a question with too many teeth.

Every so often, a shadow passed in the reflection of the window, and he looked up too fast. A taxi’s mirror flashed, a gull wheeled, a man in a suit checked his watch and moved on. He catalogued those, too. Not threats, not today. He pulled the ledger closer. He recorded the sale of a slim blue volume on early cinema and added a cursive note about the provenance. The nib scratched the paper, steady and pleasant. In the back room, the clock ticked. In the wall, something settled with a soft pop. Out front, the bell waited for a hand to touch the door.

He had chosen this life as deliberately as he’d chosen to take breath again, and again, when he could have stopped. A storefront. A set of keys. A name that fit and did not poke. He told himself, each morning with the swallow’s clear note, that it could be enough to tend to the small things—paper and ink, tea and light, listening and memory—after lifetimes defined by catastrophe. He told himself, and most days, he believed it. On the days he didn’t, he turned the sign to Open and dared the world to make him prove it.

The skyline outside his penthouse lab was a pattern of glass and light, clean lines and calculated angles. Tony stood barefoot on the cool concrete, shirt sleeves rolled up, a small screwdriver clenched between his teeth. He’d been adjusting the micro-gyro balance on a repulsor gauntlet on and off for two days, trying to squeeze an extra two percent stability from a system he’d already redesigned three times. It wasn’t about the two percent. It was about keeping his hands busy.

“JARVIS,” he said around the screwdriver, “tell me something good.”

“Define ‘good,’ sir,” JARVIS replied, that dry, pleasant British tone threading through the air like music Tony had learned by heart.

“Surprise me.”

A heartbeat’s pause. “There is a unique energy signature pulsing at regular intervals in Greenwich Village. It does not correspond to any known recorded source.”

The screwdriver slid out of his mouth, forgotten. Tony straightened. “Show me.”

A hologram spun up from the platform to his left—clean blue grids, a pulsing dot anchored mid-south of the island. Bleecker Street. He stepped closer. The pulse was steady, confident, like a heartbeat that knew it didn’t need to rush for anyone.

“Parameters,” Tony said, hand already reaching for the control interface. He was inside it before he fully realized it, the world narrowing to lines and numbers. “Amplitude, frequency, thermal bleed, EM deviation. Give me the negatives, too. What it isn’t.”

“It is not electrical, not gamma, not Stark-tech adjacent. It does not produce measurable radiation outside of a minor infrared halo when the pulse spikes. The waveform resembles a nested spiral with a harmonic overtone,” JARVIS said. The graphic adjusted, the spiral blooming in clean segments. “The signature is stable, precise. Flare duration averages two-point-three seconds, recurring every thirty-one minutes and forty-seven seconds.”

“That’s cute,” Tony muttered, already dragging the waveform wider, exposing tiny deviations. He loved this. The unknown was a mirror he could talk back to. “Any variation in the interval?”

“Plus or minus seven milliseconds.”

“So it’s on a timer,” he said, thinking out loud, already building possibility trees. “Or a heartbeat. Or someone very bored making sure I notice. What’s at that location? Cross-reference city utility maps, zoning, business directories.”

“Running.” A new set of windows unfolded in the air: a block map, lines for water, sewer, power. Everything looked normal, which meant nothing. “Street-level businesses include a café, a record store, two clothing boutiques, and an antique bookshop.”

Tony’s mouth twitched. “Of course there’s a bookshop.” He flicked his finger. The bookshop’s listing expanded: Grimmauld’s Repose. The name settled under his skin with an odd weight. “Who names these things?”

“Largely independent operators, sir.”

He stepped closer, the footage line adjusting to a thermal overlay at his command. The flare corresponded to a point within the footprint of the shop. Interior, not a basement, not the alley. During each pulse, the temperature rose fractionally. Not a lot, but consistent.

“It’s neat,” he said softly, almost to himself. “Too neat.”

He blew out a breath and leaned a hip against the workbench. He could feel his pulse pick up, the good kind, the kind that sharpened his edges. He’d seen too many things in this city go sideways. A signature that kept to itself and didn’t fit inside a box was either benign and rare, or dangerous and dressing up. He knew the difference between curiosity and compulsion. He pretended he didn’t.

“Time between flares?” he asked.

“Twenty-one minutes, thirteen seconds.”

Plenty of time. He tossed the screwdriver onto the bench and reached for his phone with his other hand, thumb flicking open a messaging app. He typed, paused, erased. He wasn’t calling anyone. Not yet. He didn’t want a committee. He wanted a look.

“Pull up previous data,” he said. “How long has this been going on?”

“First recorded pulse was ten days ago, at 08:13. The pattern has continued consistently since then.”

“Ten days and no one noticed,” he said. “Except you. That’s why I love you.”

“Your affection is noted.”

He huffed a quiet laugh, eyes on the spiral. He rotated it again, looking for a seam. There was something almost deliberate in the way it curved in on itself, repeating without degrading. Systems degraded. Entropy had a way of winning. He knew that intimately. But this held, like it didn’t care about time. That rubbed at an old part of him, the part that kept the arc reactor humming like a second sun in his chest, the part that refused to be impressed by chaos.

“Hypotheses?” he asked.

“An unknown reactor design,” JARVIS offered, “a contained, non-ionizing field generator, a localized anomaly, or a previously undocumented natural phenomenon.”

“Or,” Tony said, “option five: something that doesn’t belong on any list.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. No headache. Not yet. “Any chatter? Con Ed, NYPD, SHIELD?”

“None. The energy level is below the threshold that typically triggers alerts.”

“So it’s hiding in plain sight.” He pushed off the bench, restless. His eyes went to the far wall where a half-built drone hovered in a frame, waiting for him to make it useful. He ran a hand over his jaw. “Let’s make it our size.”

He slid into the console chair and dragged up the mini-drone schematics. Small, quiet, dressed like a pigeon. He could send it to loiter outside, sniff the air, map the heat signature in three dimensions. It wasn’t subtle. It was also faster than pretending to wait.

“What’s the ETA on the next pulse?” he asked.

“Seventeen minutes.”

“Plenty,” he said. His hands moved without looking down, calling a drone online with a tap and a code. In the corner, a hatch slid open and a small unit hummed awake, slim wings unfolding like a held breath.

“Sir,” JARVIS said gently, which meant he was about to be reasonable and Tony was about to ignore it. “Would you like me to inform Ms. Potts of your—”

“No,” he said quickly, softening the word with a half smile at the ceiling. “Pepper is busy being the queen of everything. This is a blip. A blip that’s going to keep me from sleeping if I don’t poke it. Send the drone. External sweep only. No trespassing. I like the moral high ground when it isn’t boring.”

“As you wish.”

The drone slipped out into the cold air, a speck that the city would ignore. Tony watched through its eye as it flew down along the river, turning into the maze of streets with the grace of good software. He could see the block now, the café with chalkboard signs, the narrow storefront with gold script on a dark awning. Grimmauld’s Repose. He zoomed in until he could read the curve of the letters.

The pulse hit. On the monitor, the thermal overlay shimmered. He leaned in, feeling the tug in his chest. It was beautiful in a way his brain distrusted—elegant, clean, a hand signature in a room full of machines.

“Got you,” he whispered.

The word didn’t sound like triumph. It sounded like acknowledgment.

“Maintain observation,” he said. “Record everything. No contact.”

“Understood.”

He sat back, the city reflected in the glass in front of him, the unknown flaring quietly in a small shop across town. He could pretend he’d leave it alone. He could pretend he wasn’t already planning a walk in a cap and old sunglasses. The screwdriver rolled to the edge of the bench and stopped.

“JARVIS,” he said, “set a timer for thirty-one minutes, forty-seven seconds. And keep the coffee warm.”

“Already done, sir.”

The bell over the door chimed with a neat, old-fashioned ring that sounded like it belonged in the shop. Harry looked up from the ledger, pen paused above the page. Bleeker Street’s light fell in slanted bars across the floorboards, the dust motes holding still in the quiet the way they did when the wards were at peace. He felt the pulse of the shop’s protective web shift to accommodate the new presence and slid his finger along the ledger’s spine, a subtle settling gesture. The wards relaxed. Not a threat. Not the kind he feared, anyway.

Baseball cap. Sunglasses. Stubble that was two hours too precise to be accidental. The jacket was a casual rich—technical fabric, soft at the seams, the kind designed to make you look like you didn’t try. His walk said he wasn’t from this neighborhood. His mouth said he might buy it if it amused him.

Harry smiled the way he’d practiced in mirrors over a century: a little distracted, a little fond. “Welcome to Grimmauld’s.”

The man pushed his sunglasses down his nose, like he wanted to get a better look and also be seen doing it. Brown eyes, quick; a sharpness that flickered between boredom and interest like a shutter. Tony Stark wore ordinary dressed like a dare.

“Cozy,” Tony said, wandering down the narrow aisle beside a case of Victorian paperweights. His gaze tracked details the way a hawk followed movement. He swept past the spines, fingers twitching as if they wanted to touch and knew better.

Harry watched him watch. The shop’s heartbeat kept steady in the back of his mind. The pulse that was not a heartbeat—his, and not his—made a soft loop and curled back into itself, thirty-one minutes and change until the next flare. He felt Stark’s attention grazing toward it as if pulled by scent.

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?” Harry asked. He left the pen aside and leaned his hip against the counter, casual. The light caught on the glass case to his right. Silver gleamed like a smirk.

Tony’s head tipped. “Maybe.” He stopped at the case, bent a little to look. The sunglasses ended up hooked in the collar of his shirt. “Interesting curation. You don’t do first editions of Gatsby in stacks, which means you’re not hunting tourists.” His finger tapped the glass, just once, over an oval locket the color of old moonlight. “This, for example.”

Harry let his eyes drift to the locket as though he’d forgotten it was there. The silver was cool to the touch even from across the counter, a steady weight in the room. It wasn’t cursed. It wasn’t harmless, either. He’d charmed it to discourage nightmares and petty theft and to sing to his wards when it wanted to be moved. Today it had asked to sit in the front case.

“A trinket,” Harry said lightly. “Late nineteenth century, continental. Silverwork is decent. People like things that feel like they could hold a secret.”

Tony’s smile admitted and denied everything. His left wrist made a minute angle change, palm tilting toward the glass. Harry felt the whisper-soft brush of directional field mapping the way you feel a static snap before you touch a doorknob. He shifted his weight, a small turn that sent the wards around the case into a polite fog. The hidden watch hummed almost imperceptibly, a noise under noise.

“Price?” Tony asked, eyes still on the locket. His voice had a dry lilt, like he was entertaining himself.

“For the locket?” Harry’s mouth curled. “One fifty.” He paused. “Thousand.”

Tony’s eyes flicked up to him, amused. “Does it come with a family curse or just the basic package?”

“Depends on your family,” Harry said. He stepped closer and slid the back of the case open with two fingers. The locket lay in a shallow felt groove. Close up, it was simple, oval, understated, engraved with a gently worn pattern of leaves. He lifted it with a touch that didn’t look like a touch. The chain pooled in his palm, cool and cooperative. He offered it over the glass without reaching that last inch.

Tony didn’t reach, either. He leaned in to look, and with that lean his watch caught the light, and Harry caught the microsecond of attention that went not to the metal in his hand but to the air around it. The scanner sifted. Harry let it taste a trace of the charm’s surface, then closed his fist. A cable of will slid into place; the trickle dried. The hum in Tony’s watch wavered.

Tony’s brows rose a fraction. “Sleek.” He let out a soft breath, half-laugh, like they’d shared a joke no one else would get. “You don’t look like the type to go to estate sales at dawn and haggle with lawyers.”

“I enjoy mornings,” Harry said. “And I prefer honest prices.”

“Uh-huh.” Tony’s gaze skimmed his face like a thumb over paper. “I have a weakness for things that refuse to be entirely cooperative.” His thumb traced a tiny circle in the air over the locket, as if he were measuring more than shape. “You said nightmares?”

“Some pieces hold echoes,” Harry said. He laid the locket on the velvet square atop the case. “Most shops sell the echo as if it were part of the metal. I don’t. I persuade them to leave.” He tilted his head at the locket. “This one is empty.” He let his mouth twitch. “Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Tony repeated, savoring it. The watch cycled again. A different frequency. Smart. Push at the edges. Harry felt the featherlight probe dip toward the locket’s hinge, where the ward-knot sat neat and tight. He pressed his fingertip to the silver, as if angling it to the light, and let a sliver of his own magic unspool. Not a push—just a flare. The kind of thing that set a room’s bones singing if you knew how to listen.

The watch gave a tiny, strangled hiccup and went dead.

Tony’s eyes flared with raw surprise, bright as a spark catching. Then his mouth did something rueful and pleased, like he’d been proven right in the least convenient way. He shook his wrist once. The screen stayed dark.

“Static in here,” Harry said gently. “Old buildings.” He lifted the locket and turned it so the leaf pattern caught the sun. “Bad for delicate things.”

Tony’s attention cut back to Harry, sharp now, less play and more interest. The charm of the cap and the sunglasses fell back like a curtain. He pointed with his chin at the closed inner door behind the counter, where the pulse slept behind wood and a line of chalk. “You have a generator in back?” he asked, so casual it wasn’t. “Your neighborhood’s power grid hiccupped last night.”

“We survived,” Harry said. He returned the locket to its groove. “New York is resilient.”

“Some parts of it.” Tony’s fingers came to rest on the edge of the case. He was careful not to touch the glass. “You sell to collectors?”

“I sell to people who listen when a thing calls their name,” Harry said. He let the smile reach his eyes, warm enough to be sincere. “Collectors sometimes qualify.”

He could feel the interest coming off Tony like heat through a thin shirt, the way he leaned toward the unknown and refused to be embarrassed by it. It was oddly familiar and knocked something loose in Harry’s chest. He breathed through it.

Tony straightened slightly, as if conceding a round. “Okay, Mr.…”

“Evans,” Harry said. He offered it with the ease of a well-worn alias. “Harry.”

“Mr. Evans,” Tony echoed, which sounded like he was testing the shape of it. “If I bought this, would you recommend a particular chain? My taste runs to the dramatic, but I can do understated when the occasion demands.”

Harry’s hand hovered over the velvet. “I’d recommend giving it to someone who sleeps badly,” he said. “And telling them not to wear it in the shower.”

Tony laughed, short and real. “Noted.” He looked at the locket one more time. His eyes went distant for a fraction, calculating, cataloging, censoring the part of him that wanted to ask the right question in the wrong place. He tapped his knuckles against the glass, thoughtful. “I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll keep it aside for a day,” Harry said, like he hadn’t already decided to put it in a drawer with a ward on it the second the door closed.

Tony slid his sunglasses back on, the move too smooth to be habit. “I might have more questions,” he said, casual as a thrown coin.

“I might have answers,” Harry returned, no weight in it. He closed the case with a click, then set the locket’s velvet pad to rights.

Tony’s smile was quick and self-contained. “See you soon, Harry.”

The bell chimed again when he left. The slice of outside air smelled like street and coffee and exhaust. The wards breathed out. Harry stood with his hand on the cool glass of the case and watched the door settle back into its frame.

The dead hum of Stark’s watch still tingled faintly in the air like lightning long gone. The pulse under the floorboards curled on schedule, steady as ever. Harry exhaled. He reached for the chalk and, for the first time since he’d opened the shop, drew a second line under the threshold.

He waited until the door’s hush settled and the city’s noise thinned to a thread. Then he turned the velvet pad with two fingers, the locket’s chain whispering across the surface, and let the shop put its mask back on. Eccentric, harmless, a little fussy. He could do that.

The bell chimed again before the minute ticked over. Tony had not gone far. He came back in without the sunglasses this time, eyes bright like he’d just decided something. Harry didn’t let his pulse jump.

“Forgot to ask,” Tony said. He gestured vaguely toward the case, toward the air. “You ever get things that… keep out the bad stuff?” He was casual with intent, the way a thief palmed a coin just to show you he could.

Harry smiled, easy. “If by ‘bad stuff’ you mean nosy neighbors and garden-variety hexes, yes. If you mean tax audits, no.”

Tony’s mouth curved. He drifted closer, scanning like he couldn’t help it—the shelving, the counter, the line of dusty apothecary jars labeled with careful script that would read as nonsense to anyone who hadn’t been raised on it. He tapped the glass with one finger, near the locket. “This fall in the neighbor-and-hex category?”

“It falls in the stop-dreaming-about-your-ex category,” Harry said. He drew the locket out again and let it balance on his palm, silver on skin. He felt the tech in Tony’s watch trying to breathe and not quite catching. “Wards off bad vibes. Encourages better ones. It’s a trinket, not an exorcism.”

Tony lifted a brow. “Bad vibes. That the technical term?”

“It’s the sales term,” Harry said, tone airy. “The technical term would take us both three hours and a blackboard.”

“You have a blackboard?” Tony asked, eyes flicking to the back room with transparent curiosity.

“I have chalk,” Harry said. “And rules about who gets to use it.”

Tony’s gaze came back to him, amused, sharp. “Cagey. You’ve got a charming aesthetic, Mr. Evans. Like a professor who ran away to sell haunted typewriters.”

“None of my typewriters are haunted,” Harry said. “Possessive, sometimes. They prefer certain hands.”

“Don’t we all,” Tony murmured, distracted, his attention grazing the locket again. “So, it helps with sleep.”

“If you want it to,” Harry said. He turned the oval over, showing the neat hinge, the wear on the pattern where countless thumbs had rubbed it over time. “Tricks the mind into not circling the same track at two a.m. Think of it as a suggestion, not an order. It’s very gentle.”

“Gentle,” Tony repeated, considering. “Does gentle play nice with, say, high-end electromagnets? Asking for a friend.”

Harry laughed softly. “If your friend wears it to a particle accelerator, tell him to tuck it under his shirt and think happy thoughts.”

“And if my friend is more into—hypothetically—unusual frequencies?” He flicked a glance at his watch and back, a hint of showmanship even when caught. “Would it short out his toys?”

“That depends on the toy,” Harry said evenly, letting the corner of his mouth tilt. “Some toys don’t like to be told to be quiet.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed, not offended, only delighted at having the ball returned with spin. “You can tell a lot about a person from their toys.”

“And from the way they pretend not to have them,” Harry said, mild as tea.

Silence pulsed once between them, light and thin. Tony looked at him, really looked, like he was trying to map edges he couldn’t see. Then he huffed, a small exhale that let him release the pretense without dignifying it by naming it.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s pretend I didn’t come in here to run numbers on your trinket. Let’s pretend I’m a guy who doesn’t sleep and likes the idea of not staring at the ceiling at three a.m. Sell me on it.”

Harry set the locket down on the velvet square again and slid the pad a fraction closer to the glass, just shy of offering. “It’s silver,” he said, straightforward, as if the metal itself were the point. “It’s made by a hand that cared. There’s a shape to it that fits between your finger and thumb when you need to remind yourself that you are here and not somewhere else. It’s been quieted. Whatever it carried before, it doesn’t anymore. If you wear it, it will pick up what you’re asking it to do, the way a room picks up a scent. It’s useful. It won’t fix a life. It will make a night easier.”

Tony’s throat moved on a swallow he didn’t hide. For a breath, the crackle in him gentled. He leaned his hip on the counter and considered Harry, then the locket. “Honest answer,” he said. “Rare.”

“Honest prices, honest answers,” Harry said, light. “I told you.”

“Right,” Tony said, like he was cataloging the phrase. He lifted a hand, stopped before touching. He didn’t need to; his attention did it for him. “You mind if I ask—what do you listen for? When you say something calls a name.”

Harry let the silence settle like dust. Then he said, “I listen for the person who wants to use it for what it’s for, not for what they’re afraid of.”

Tony’s mouth tipped, quick and involuntary. “That’s very fortune-cookie of you, but I’ll allow it.”

Harry laughed under his breath. “You don’t have to buy it.”

“I know.” Tony looked up at him again, intent and curious, no longer pretending not to be either. “But you’re putting it aside for a day.”

“Am I?” Harry asked, giving him nothing and everything.

“You are,” Tony said, as though he could decree it by charisma alone. “Because your instincts are pricking at you, and mine are, and I want to see whether they’re talking about the same thing.”

Harry felt the smile arrive before he could stop it, brief and a little dangerous. “One day,” he agreed. “After that, it goes back in the case with the accidental tourists.”

“Accidental tourists,” Tony repeated, savoring the phrase. He pushed off the counter. “I have a meeting I’m late for. My assistant will yell at me and I’ll pretend to care. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be here,” Harry said.

Tony took two steps, then paused, glancing back. The sunglasses were still absent; his face was open in a way Harry suspected he didn’t let happen often. “These bad vibes,” he said softly, the joke shaved down to its bones. “You sure they stay out?”

Harry looked at the locket, then at Tony, and let the truth be simple. “I’m good at keeping doors closed,” he said. “I’m better at opening them when they need to be.”

Something flickered over Tony’s face—recognition, maybe, or relief at finding someone who spoke the same language without translation. He nodded once. “See you tomorrow, Harry.”

The bell took the weight of his exit and made it harmless. Harry set the locket back into its groove and closed the case with care. He breathed out, turned the sign on the door to Appointment Only for the next hour, and went to the back room. He took the chalk from the shelf, wiped the line he’d drawn under the threshold, and redrew it, thinner, sharper. The shop hummed around him like a cat settling into a lap. He told himself he had not invited the storm in. He told himself it had already chosen this street.

He put the chalk down and went back to the counter, eccentric and harmless, ready to sell trinkets that kept the dark at bay.

Tony came back before lunch, as if the hour between meetings had been enough for him to decide irritation was more useful than charm. He didn’t bother with sunglasses this time. He walked straight to the case, to the locket sitting where Harry had left it, like a problem on a test he meant to solve by sheer defiance.

“Your trinket,” Tony said, planting his palms on the glass. “Humor me. What’s it made of, exactly? Don’t say silver. I did that part.”

Harry lifted his gaze from the ledger. “Mostly silver,” he said. “A little patience. A touch of superstition.”

“I love a handcrafted vibe as much as the next boutique owner,” Tony said, but the humor had gone thin. He turned his wrist. The watch’s face brightened with a pulse. The band was different—sleeker, a new module on the underside. “Here’s the thing. My toys don’t usually cough when they’re near a paperweight.”

“You should get better toys,” Harry said, mild.

Tony smiled without warmth. “Walk me through the cough.”

Harry closed the ledger. “You don’t want the explanation I’d give you,” he said evenly. “It won’t fit with what lets you sleep at night.”

“Newsflash, I don’t sleep,” Tony said. He angled his wrist over the glass. The watch gave off a sound like a cat’s warning growl, then steadied. “So tell me what’s making an EM signature I can’t categorize. Or,” he lifted his brows, “what you did to my watch yesterday.”

“Are you sure it was me?” Harry asked. He leaned his hip against the counter, composed. “Technology fails sometimes. That’s not new.”

“Right,” Tony said. He tapped two fingers along the casing, and a second screen unrolled, thin as film. Numbers dripped down it in green. “Except my tech doesn’t fail. Not when I don’t want it to.”

Harry watched the cascade and kept his face smooth. The urge to deflect, to be light, pressed hard against his teeth. He let the urge pass. “You’re not going to like this answer.”

“Try me.”

“There are things,” Harry said, “that don’t run on your current model of how the world works. You can scan them all day and all night, and the output will be nonsense. Not because they are nonsense. Because your language can’t parse them.”

Tony’s head tilted, eyes narrowing. “You sound like a priest who’s learned some physics and thinks it makes him interesting.”

“I sound like a person who knows where his edges are,” Harry said. “Do you?”

Tony’s jaw went tight. He leaned in, the watch hovering a breath above the glass, closer to the locket. The numbers spiked. A line of text flashed red. Tony’s mouth curved in satisfaction, and something inside Harry sighed in warning.

“JARVIS,” Tony said, voice low, “recording?”

“Always, sir,” came the polite murmur from nowhere.

Harry felt the way the shop’s protections shivered, attentive now. He kept his hands on the counter. “Mr. Stark,” he said, an edge under the civility, “this isn’t a lab.”

“Everything’s a lab,” Tony said. “If you do it right.”

Harry’s fingers brushed the velvet square the locket rested on. The silver felt cool even through the cloth. He let himself taste the truth of it, the hum under everything he’d drawn here, the careful threads binding the room into a place that was safe and quiet and simple. He hated that he was about to break his own rules. He hated that Tony seemed determined to make him.

“Back up,” Harry said softly.

Tony didn’t. He pushed the watch that last millimeter. The hum in the room sharpened to a whistle no one could hear with their ears. Harry let a sliver of himself slip. It wasn’t a spell; it was a suggestion to the air, a reminder to the metal that it had other loyalties. A thin flick of intent, precise as a pin.

The watch stuttered. The numbers on Tony’s film went jagged, then smeared. The face of the watch flickered, brightened, dimmed, and went dark with a soft, insect death-rattle.

Tony jerked his wrist back. “What did you just do?” He masked the startle fast, but Harry felt it, like a cool draft. He fought down the reflex to apologize. There was nothing to apologize for.

“I asked you to back up,” Harry said. He nodded at the dead watch. “Your toy doesn’t like being told to be quiet.”

Tony held his arm up, like angles would change the outcome. He tapped the face. Nothing. He rapped it with his knuckle, a short, irritated sound. “JARVIS?”

“No connectivity, sir,” the AI answered. “The device appears to have suffered… interference.”

Tony’s laugh was bare and disbelieving. He looked at Harry. Really looked. “You’re very calm for a man who just bricked a fifty-thousand-dollar prototype.”

“It’ll recover,” Harry said. He kept his voice even and let his eyes stay on Tony’s. “You should take it outside and let it breathe.”

“You did something,” Tony pressed. The curiosity had sharpened into something like hunger. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“I don’t pretend,” Harry said. “Not about this.” He slid the velvet square back into the case and closed the lid. His hand was steady. The locket lay there, innocent as a coin. “You came in here to force an answer out of a thing that doesn’t owe you one. You pushed. It pushed back.”

“It?” Tony echoed. “What is it?”

“The part you don’t have a shelf for,” Harry said. He turned the key in the case lock with a quiet click. The sound felt final. He lifted his gaze again. “I’m going to ask you to leave, Mr. Stark.”

Tony’s brows shot up. “Because I asked a question?”

“Because you didn’t listen when I told you this wasn’t a lab,” Harry said. He kept his tone polite and unbudgeable. “And because my patience for being poked at is shorter than yours for poking.”

They stared at each other over the glass. Tony’s mouth flattened. The muscles in his forearm flexed under the dead watchband. For a long breath, Harry thought he’d lean in harder, that he’d throw charm or money or sheer stubbornness at the wall Harry was holding.

Instead, Tony pushed away from the counter. He slid the film back into the watchband with a frustrated flick and adjusted his cuff like he needed something to do with his hands. “You’re not what you’re pretending to be,” he said, not accusing, almost pleased by the observation.

“I told you what I am,” Harry said. “A shopkeeper.”

Tony’s eyes flicked to the chalk line barely visible under the threshold, to the closed case, to Harry’s hands at rest on the counter. He made a thoughtful sound. “Sure.”

He took two steps back. The bell above the door waited. He looked at Harry one more time, interest burning hotter than offense now. “This conversation isn’t finished.”

“It is for today,” Harry said.

The corner of Tony’s mouth lifted, acknowledging the point without conceding the war. He reached for the door. “See you soon,” he said, and there was a promise in it.

The bell sang when he left, bright and brief. The wards took the sound and smoothed it flat. Harry stood very still until the echo was gone. He felt the place settle, the way a pond settled after a rock had been tossed in.

He exhaled slowly. He lifted the locket again with care, turned it once in his fingers, and set it in the safe under the counter instead of the case. He closed the safe on it, the tumblers slipping into place. The quiet came back, but it was different now, aware of its own edges.

Across the street, Tony paused, looking back through the glass, his expression unreadable from this distance. He touched the dead watch with his thumb like it was the wrist of someone he wanted to wake. Then he shook his head, smiled to himself, and walked away.

Harry leaned his palms on the counter and let his head fall forward for a moment, eyes closed. He had been gentle. He’d been as gentle as he could. It didn’t matter. The storm had seen the door. It would come back. He would be ready with answers or with silence. He wasn’t sure which would be harder.