As soon as he loosens the wards on the door, he feels the dark magic seeping out. This will not be pleasant. He doesn’t go any farther into the vault than he has to, and he casts as bright a lumos as he can. If there was ever an inventory made of the contents of the Black vault, he’s not aware of it, so he only has his own judgment to rely on. He’s looking for something that he’s unaware of, something his mother never mentioned. It will be something that the Dark Lord gave Bellatrix nearly two decades ago, before he killed Potter’s parents, before she went to Azkaban for torturing the Longbottoms. He looks around slowly. There is the expected pile of galleons, the shelves of glittering jewelry, but he’s looking for something incongruous. Hermione said it might be something related to the Founders. Directly in front of him is a huge display cabinet filled with silver serving pieces – platters, teapots, punchbowls and epergnes, but that’s not surprising. With the exception of the renegade Sirius, the Blacks have always been sorted into Slytherin, so they accumulated a lot of silver. There’s nothing ... he takes a step forward. On the second shelf from the top, there is a lone object made of gold, not silver. It is a double-handled gold cup, of modest size and design, adorned with – oh, thank Merlin – a Hufflepuff badger. It’s too high to reach, and he’s apprehensive about touching anything else in the vault, so he casts a widespread sticking charm over the entire vault. Then, very carefully, he releases only the Hufflepuff cup from the sticking charm and summons it to him, directing it to land gently at his feet. A careful examination with his wand shows him that it has been doubly cursed, first with a combusti that will cause it to burst into flames if anyone touches it, and second with a duplicare that could be triggered by any sudden movement. He’s good at curse breaking, but this isn’t something he can do in a few minutes, and if it goes wrong ... well, better not to think about that. He works on the duplicare first on the principle that if he can’t break the combusti, one flaming cup is better than an infinite number of them. It takes him nearly an hour, but he finally eliminates it. The combusti requires another hour, and by then, he’s exhausted. Even now, with both the protective spells disabled, the cup reeks of dark magic, and he doesn’t like having to touch it, let alone put it in his pocket. He looks around the vault one more time, and finds a reasonably attractive silver necklace on the floor near the jewelry cases. A quick check shows that it’s had no spells cast on it, so he pockets it as well. It’s an incredible relief when he returns to the ground level of the bank and is able to walk out of the building onto the street. The curse-breaking has taken more out of him than he anticipated it would, but rushing through projects that involve dark magic is dangerous. The next task will have to wait till tomorrow.