PROLOGUE
|| PROLOGUE ||
Himalayan Institute of Law & Justice, Mussoorie
They say some places don’t remember people.
Mussoorie does. It remembers too much.
On nights when fog crawls down the pine slopes like a slow confession, the campus of HILJ turns almost unreal—stone corridors breathing cold air, windows holding reflections that don’t quite belong to the present. Somewhere in that silence, a courtroom light stays on long after hours, as if waiting for a verdict that has already decided everyone’s fate.
Dhruv Sehgal stands there first, collar adjusted twice, then a third time, like discipline can pin down what emotion refuses to name. He is calm in the way storms are calm right before they learn destruction.
Across the corridor, laughter cuts through the mist.
Tara Sethi always arrives like she is interrupting reality itself—too loud for the quiet, too alive for the order this place pretends to have. People mistake it for carelessness. They always do. They never notice how her eyes pause a fraction too long on things that hurt.
And somewhere between them, unseen but inevitable, Zayn Ahuja watches like a match that enjoys being struck—smiling at rules only to see how they burn.
Years later, a courtroom will hold all three of them in the same frame
Law will be argued. Truth will be dissected. Words will be weaponized until they stop sounding like words.
But none of that will matter as much as this—
Before verdicts, before rivalries, before love learned how to disguise itself as war…
They already belonged to each other in ways none of them understood yet.
