PROLOGUE
Delhi didn’t wait for anyone.
Not for the exhausted girl stepping out of the railway station with a dying phone battery and two overpacked suitcases. Not for the fog curling through evening traffic. Not for homesickness sitting quietly in her throat like unshed rain.
The city moved anyway.
Fast. Loud. Glittering.
Ira Jadhav stood outside the station for exactly thirty seconds before an auto driver attempted financial terrorism.
“Eight hundred, madam.”
“Are you taking me to college,” she asked tiredly, “or adopting me?”
The man looked offended. Delhi looked entertained.
Somewhere behind her, someone laughed.
By the time she reached campus, winter had settled fully over the city. Fog blurred the tall buildings into ghosts. Students spilled across pathways with coffee cups in hand, expensive sneakers splashing through muddy sidewalks. The air smelled like smoke, chai, wet leaves, and possibility.
Her mother called before she could even enter the hostel.
“Reached?”
“No, Aai. I’m astral projecting.”
“Ira.”
“I reached.”
A pause.
Then, softer:
“Did you eat?”
And there it was.
Love, translated into Indian parenting.
Ira smiled despite herself.
Hours later, alone in her new hostel room, she stood near the window watching unfamiliar lights flicker across campus. Somewhere in the distance, a crowd suddenly erupted into cheers loud enough to shake the silence apart.
Curious, she looked up.
Floodlights cut through the fog.
A football field.
Students crowded the stands despite the cold, their voices echoing across campus like thunder.
And at the center of it all stood someone dressed entirely in black, walking across the turf with the kind of presence people moved around instinctively.
Tall.
Sharp.
Unreadable.
The crowd screamed his name.
“Rivan!”
Someone behind Ira’s room in the corridor sighed dramatically.
“God,” a girl whispered to her friend. “He looks illegal under stadium lights.”
Ira snorted quietly and pulled the curtains shut.
She didn’t know it yet.
But somewhere between this city, that football field, and the family carrying the surname Oberoi…
her life had already begun changing shape.
