CROWN IDOLATRY

Parikshit Rathore is a name that has carried weight long before it has carried meaning. Descended from old royalty and insulated by power, he moves through the city and its most elite college—like consequences do not apply to him. Because they don’t. He is disciplined, brilliant, feared—and unstable in ways people choose not to see. His violence is excused as temperament. His audacity is mistaken for poise. The crown he is born into protects him from scrutiny, even when blood stains its history. Nandini Kulkarni lives on the opposite end of that gravity. Raised in a conservative, upper-middle-class household, she learns early how to be contained—how to take up less space, how to excel quietly, how to turn longing into something private and survivable. How to love someone like him from a distance. She dances, she studies, she observes—moving through the same college without ever truly belonging to his world. Circumstance forces them together as student and teacher. Parikshit leaves no room for illusion, pressing her to accept his entitlement, his rudeness, and the vast, unbridgeable distance between their worlds that contradicts every fragment of the man she had imagined in her head. But when she stumbles upon a darker truth than what the heir's reputation carries on the surface, it fractures everything she believes she understands. Now, Nandini must confront what it means to worship a man who was never taught the difference between love and control.