The Devil's Last Bride

The bride was crying before the ceremony even started. Not the pretty kind of crying, either. There was nothing delicate about it. Her mascara had already started surrendering, her nose was turning pink, and she kept insisting she was fine while simultaneously ruining the makeup she’d spent two hours having professionally applied.

I had photographed enough weddings to know this was normal.

“Don’t touch your face,” I told her.

She immediately touched her face.

I sighed and reached into my bag for a tissue. “You’re making my job harder.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Just stop crying.”

She laughed, which was what I wanted. I raised my camera. “Perfect. Hold that.”

The shutter clicked.

That was the part of weddings I actually liked. Not the vows. Not the flowers. Not the three hundred people pretending they weren’t judging the food. The photographs.

A wedding was one of the few occasions where people willingly let you point a camera at them for hours and somehow considered it sentimental instead of deeply invasive. I liked catching the things people didn’t know I’d seen—a nervous hand tightening around a glass, a father trying not to cry, someone laughing in the background while everyone else was posing. Those were the pictures that mattered. The ones nobody planned.

By the time the ceremony ended, I’d taken nearly six hundred photographs and eaten exactly three pieces of cheese from the appetizer table. Occupational hazards.

The reception was being held in one of those old downtown hotels that had apparently decided it was still 1927 and had no intention of changing its mind. Marble floors, brass railings, enormous chandeliers, and enough gold trim to make the entire building look like it had been designed by someone with a personal grudge against subtlety. The room was packed.

I moved between tables, taking photographs of people laughing, drinking, and pretending they weren’t already drunk. The bride and groom were dancing in the center of the room when I noticed him.

He wasn’t doing anything. That was what caught my attention.

Everyone else was moving—talking, drinking, dancing, taking pictures with their phones. He was sitting alone near the windows at the far end of the room, one arm resting casually along the back of his chair. Black suit. White shirt. No tie. He looked expensive without looking like he was trying to look expensive. More importantly, he looked completely comfortable.

I watched him for a moment through the camera. He wasn’t watching the bride. He wasn’t watching the groom. He was watching the room. No—not the room. The people. There was something oddly detached about him, like he was observing a species he’d encountered many times before but still hadn’t entirely figured out.

I lowered the camera. He looked directly at me.

I glanced behind myself, because apparently my brain had decided there was a possibility he was staring at someone more interesting. There wasn’t anyone there. When I looked back, he was still watching me. Then he smiled. Not a big smile. Barely anything at all. Just enough to acknowledge that he’d caught me staring.

I should have looked away. Instead, I raised my camera. He didn’t object. I focused. The room narrowed around the viewfinder. The music became distant, the chatter blurred into background noise, and he became the only thing in the frame that seemed completely still.

I pressed the shutter. Then again.

I lowered the camera and glanced at the screen. The first photograph looked fine. The second looked fine too. The lighting was good. The composition wasn’t bad. His face was clear. I zoomed in. He had pale eyes. Gray, maybe. It was difficult to tell under the warm lighting.

I looked up. He was still there. For some reason, I took another photograph. The shutter clicked. I looked at the screen. The chair was empty.

I frowned. I looked up again. He was sitting exactly where he’d been before, one ankle resting over the opposite knee, his expression unchanged. I looked back at the camera. Empty chair. I zoomed in. Nothing. No blur. No distortion. No strange artifact. The photograph looked completely normal; the chair was simply empty.

I took another. Empty. My grip tightened around the camera. I looked at him again. He was watching me now. Not smiling.

I lowered the camera. “Okay,” I muttered to myself. “That’s fucking weird.”

A server passed in front of me carrying a tray of champagne. I waited for him to move. Then I looked back. The chair was empty. My stomach dropped. I scanned the room. Nothing. I turned toward the entrance. Nothing.

Maybe he’d left. That was the obvious explanation. People stood up and walked away. Human beings had been doing that successfully for quite some time. I checked the photograph again. Empty chair. I took one last picture of it. The photograph showed exactly what I could see: an empty chair. I stared at the screen for several seconds before putting the camera down.

“You’re losing your mind.”

“Who are you talking to?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. The bride was standing beside me. I forced a smile. “Nobody.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “You’re talking to yourself.”

“I’ve been photographing your wedding for six hours. I’m allowed to start talking to myself.”

She laughed. “Did you get the pictures of my dad?”

“About fifty.”

“Good. He keeps pretending he wasn’t crying.”

“He was absolutely crying.”

“Thank you.” She smiled and wandered back toward the dance floor.

I looked toward the windows again. Still nothing. I told myself to forget it. I did. For approximately four minutes.

Then someone sat down in the chair. I saw him before I realized it was him. Same black suit. Same relaxed posture. Same expression. He hadn’t walked over. He was simply there.

I stared. He raised his glass slightly. Then he looked toward my camera. His eyes dropped to it. And he smiled.

This time, I didn’t take the picture. I didn’t know why. Something in the way he looked at me made the little hairs along my arms rise.

He stood. For the first time, I noticed how tall he was. He wasn’t enormous, but he carried himself with the kind of effortless confidence that made everyone around him seem smaller. He walked toward me. I stayed where I was. He stopped a few feet away.

Up close, he was even stranger. Not frightening. Not exactly. Just… difficult to place. There was nothing particularly unusual about his face, yet I couldn’t stop looking at him.

“You’ve been photographing me,” he said. His voice was low enough that I almost didn’t hear him over the music.

“I photograph everyone.”

“Not like that.”

I glanced at my camera. “What does that mean?”

“You’ve taken six photographs of me.”

I frowned. “I took three.”

He smiled. “I know.”

I stared at him. There was something about the way he said it. Not defensive. Not teasing. Certain.

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know how many pictures I’ve taken?”

His expression didn’t change. “I pay attention.”

I should have walked away. Instead, because apparently self-preservation had taken the evening off, I asked, “What’s your name?”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Sorin.”

Just Sorin. No last name. No explanation. I waited. He seemed perfectly content to let the silence sit there.

I laughed softly. “That’s it?”

“For tonight.”

There was something almost amused in his expression. I shook my head. “You’re weird.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

He looked past me toward the dance floor, then back at me. “You’re going to take another photograph.”

It wasn’t a question.

I raised an eyebrow. “Am I?”

“Eventually.”

“That’s pretty confident.”

“I’ve been watching you.”

That should have sounded creepy. Instead, somehow, it sounded almost affectionate. I hated that. I also hated the fact that I wanted to photograph him again.

Before I could decide whether that made me an idiot, someone called my name from across the room. I turned. When I looked back, Sorin was gone.

I searched the room. Nothing. No black suit. No empty chair. No sign that he’d ever been there. I looked down at my camera. The last photograph was still on the screen. The chair. Empty.

I stared at it. Then, very slowly, I zoomed in.

At the edge of the frame, reflected faintly in the dark window behind the chair, was the silhouette of a man.

I looked up. The window reflected the room—people dancing, chandeliers, tables, me. But not him.

I looked back at the photograph. There he was. Not in the chair. Not in the room. Only in the reflection.

And for the first time that night, I was genuinely afraid.