Blurb：
Willa's world shatters when she discovers hundreds of love poems addressed to her in guardian Rhett Sterling's hidden journals. Fleeing his twisted obsession, she returns years later to confront his ghost at a funeral that reveals darker secrets - an empty urn, a teenage Rhett photograph, and a violent leap through time. Thrust into 18-year-old Rhett's reckless world of gaming dens and street races, adult Willa grapples with shockingly different versions of the man who raised her: a self-destructive troublemaker smelling of smoke and rebellion rather than fatherly protection. As their dangerous connection deepens through brutal arcade showdowns and stolen moments battling his toxic stepfamily, Willa must unravel the truth behind Sterling's time-warped past before his impending disappearance at The Grand Elysian Hotel destroys both their timelines. Torn between disgust for his forbidden poems and desperate need to save this younger, vulnerable Rhett, she risks becoming the obsession she fears - even as his bloodied knuckles grip her waist with possessive fire no guardian should possess.
Content：
§PROLOGUEMy guardian, Rhett Sterling, never allowed me to call him Father.
I didn't understand why, not until the day I stumbled into his home office and found the poems.
Dozens of them, hundreds, all bound in leather journals.
All of them written for me.
My name, Willa, was a desperate prayer on every page.
Nausea coiled in my gut, hot and sharp.
The man who had raised me, the man I trusted implicitly, had been writing love poems to his ward.
To a child.
I fled the country that night, giving him no chance to explain.
I wanted him erased from my life.
And then, two years later, he was.
At his funeral, I found out the truth was far more twisted than I could have ever imagined.
§01
The weight of the urn was unbearable.
It was a simple, polished marble box, cold against my trembling hands.
Rhett’s lawyer had just given it to me, his expression a mask of professional sympathy.
My mind was a maelstrom of grief and a bitter, lingering resentment.
I had been so sure I hated him.
But the tears streaming down my face were a traitorous testament to a truth my pride refused to accept.
My heart ached with a hollow, relentless pain.
I wanted him back.
A wild, childish impulse seized me.
I couldn’t leave him here, in the cold, sterile niche of a mausoleum.
Rhett hated the cold.
Ignoring the shocked gasps of the assembled mourners, I spun on my heel and ran.
The marble floor of the corridor was slick beneath my heels.
I took the stairs two at a time, my breath coming in ragged sobs.
Then my heel caught.
Time seemed to slow as I pitched forward.
The urn flew from my grasp, striking the hard ground with a sickening crack.
My breath hitched.
Frantically, I scrambled to gather the pieces, to salvage what was left of him.
But the box was empty.
No ashes.
No remains.
Just a single photograph, carefully sealed in a plastic sleeve.
I picked it up, my heart pounding against my ribs.
It was a picture of me, my face turned towards the camera, a hesitant smile on my lips.
And beside me, his gaze fixed not on the lens but on me, was Rhett Sterling.
His eyes, full of a fierce, pious adoration, were the eyes of a boy.
He couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
But that was impossible.
The day Rhett Sterling took me in, the day he saved me, he was already thirty years old.
§02
My pulse hammered in my ears.
A wild, impossible theory clawed its way into my mind.
I had to know.
Stumbling to my feet, I ran towards his office, the photograph clutched in my hand.
The moment I pushed the door open, a blinding white light erupted from the room.
It swallowed everything.
When my vision cleared, I was no longer in the Sterling manor.
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The End