Burning Point (After the Ash Duet #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

TARYN

Ben Calder didn’t believe in punishment that left visible marks. He believed in the kind that lived under your skin.

The garage smelled of rubber mats and metal—cold iron, old sweat, and gun oil.

The overhead light buzzed like a trapped insect, bleaching everything in its harsh glare.

Ben stood beside the workbench, his stopwatch in one hand and a legal pad in the other, as if this were a job site and I were a tool he needed calibrated.

I called him Ben in my head because he felt as far from what I believed a dad should be, as you could get. Of course, out loud I called him Dad—I wasn’t brave enough to do otherwise.

“Shoes,” he grumbled.

I didn’t argue.

Arguing wasn’t tolerated, and this day was going to be difficult enough without me adding to it—no point in stoking the fire.

I took off my sneakers and stepped onto the mat in my socks. The concrete underneath was hot, despite it being fall. My legs ached from yesterday, the day before, and every day that ended with me not being good enough.

Ben—Dad’s gaze flicked over me as if he were running a checklist in his head.

Hair up.

No jewelry.

Water bottle full.

Knees not locked.

Shoulders back.

He was careful in the way a man is careful with a firearm—no wasted motion, no room for error, no sympathy for flinching.

“Warm-up,” he said, with zero inflection. “Three minutes.”

I dropped and immediately began stretching. Then my workout began.

“Higher.”

“Faster.”

“Again.”

His voice never rose, and that was the hardest part. If he’d been angry, it might have felt like I mattered more. Ben’s tone was always the same—calm, clear, and straightforward—whether he was explaining how to clear a jam or field-strip a weapon.

The timer beeped.

“Push-ups,” he growled. “Sixty.”

I spread my hands on the mat and lowered myself.

One.

My arms shook on twenty.

My shoulders screamed at thirty.

My core cramped at forty.

Ben’s pen scratched on paper with each count, a metronome marking my failure before I’d even earned it.

“Don’t drop your hips.”

I fixed it.

Fifty.

My elbows felt as if they were full of glass. My breath became hot and ragged. Sweat slid down my spine.

“You’re lagging,” he said, not accusing, just observing as if he were watching the weather.

Fifty-five.

My wrists trembled. The mat blurred.

“Again,” he muttered when I hit sixty and collapsed onto my knees.

I stared up at him, chest heaving.

Ben’s expression didn’t change. “You should be better than this. When the shit hits the fan, you don’t get time to catch your breath.”

There it was. Not a punishment. A lesson. Everything with Ben was a lesson.

I forced myself down.

One.

I wasn’t sure if he did this because he believed it would strengthen me or because he didn’t know any other way to survive in a world where control was the only thing that kept you safe.

Both could be true.

Both were true.

By the time I hit thirty, my arms were jelly, and my teeth were clenched so hard my jaw ached.

I tasted copper.

He crouched, not close enough to touch me. Ben rarely touched me. When he did, it was a correction—an adjustment of my stance, a shove of my shoulder into alignment, a grip on my wrist when my form slipped, and he decided pain would teach faster than words.

He didn’t need to hit. He had other weapons at his disposal.

“Look at me,” he narrowed his eyes.

I lifted my head.

His eyes were flat, the color of storm clouds. “Why are we doing this?”

I swallowed. My throat hurt. Everything hurt.

“So I can protect myself,” I whispered, my voice shaky.

“What else?” His tone sharpened by a fraction.

My arms quivered. Sweat dripped from my chin onto the mat. My mind jumbled from exhaustion, and I couldn’t think.

“So you can perform under pressure.” He looked at me with disappointment for not responding. “You lead a comfortable life,” he continued. “Comfort is a lie. It gives you the impression that the world is gentle. But it’s not.”

I looked away.

“Eyes up,” he snapped.

I looked back at his face.

His gaze pinned me like a target. “Again.”

I finished the set.

I completed the next task he assigned because that’s what I did. I endured the pain he doled out.

Ben made me run the shuttle drills he’d devised across the garage, heel-turning on the tape lines he’d laid down months ago.

He made me hold a plank until my shoulders shook so hard I thought something in me would tear.

Then wall sits with a weighted plate on my thighs, staring straight ahead while my legs lit up like they were being cooked from the inside.

When I finally faltered—just a fraction of a second, a tiny drop in my posture—Ben’s voice cut in with surgical precision.

“Again.”

I hated him.

I loved him.

Both feelings lived side by side inside me, fighting for dominance.

The timer beeped again.

“Hydrate,” he said.

I reached for my water bottle with trembling hands that barely held on, then lifted it up and drank eagerly. The cool water was like heaven to my parched mouth, bringing instant relief.

Ben didn’t drink. He wrote.

I watched him. The line of his jaw. Shoulders back. He never relaxed, ever, even at home, even with no one watching. He carried himself like he was always waiting for something to go wrong.

Maybe he always was.

He was in his late forties but kept himself in excellent condition. His workouts were twice as hard as mine, and that was saying something. Brooke had called him a ‘DILF’ (Dad I’d like to fuck) once. She didn’t do it again after I tore into her. I shuddered with disgust.

“What did the school call about?” Ben asked, not looking up.

Shit.

“Nothing,” I tried desperately to hide the shaking in my voice.

Unlike ninety-nine percent of the world, we still had a home phone with an answering machine. I’d damn near wrecked in my desperation to beat him home to erase the call.

How did he know?

His pen stilled.

I could feel my heart beating in my ears.

He finally lifted his gaze. “Is that your final answer?”

“Yes,” I repeated, because I was stupid, or brave, or desperate—pick your poison.

He didn’t blink. “Lying is a habit. Habits get you killed.”

The words weren’t dramatic. They weren’t spoken in anger. They were just… facts. That was his favorite weapon: certainty.

I held his gaze in challenge for a moment before I dropped my eyes.

I wanted to be the girl at home that I was at school.

Untouchable.

The girl who didn’t flinch, capable of ending a rumor with a single sentence, and whose smile could cut like the sharpest blade.

But that wasn’t likely to happen with Ben.

At home, I was the girl on a mat, sweating and shaking, pretending my body didn’t hurt because the alternative was weakness—and weakness was blood in the water.

“Last drill,” he said tonelessly. “Knife work.”

Ben moved to the workbench and opened the drawer. The blade he pulled out wasn’t flashy. No serrations. No dramatic shine. Just a clean, practical knife that would do what it was meant to do without ceremony.

He tossed it.

I caught it automatically.

He nodded once, approval silent. “Grips wrong.”

I adjusted.

“Again.”

I adjusted. Again.

Ben set up a dummy—canvas wrapped tight around a stand, marked with taped-off zones. It looked like a torso if you squinted and let your imagination do the work.

“Here and here,” he pointed at the strike points. “That’s where you need to hit to cause maximum damage."

I practiced hitting the points over and over. My arms screamed, and my hands were wet with sweat. The knife felt impossibly heavier with each strike.

“Taryn.”

He spoke my name as if it were an order.

I stilled.

He leaned in, his gaze heavy. “You believe you can control what others think of you.”

My throat went dry. It was a statement rather than a question.

“I don’t care what people think,” I muttered defensively.

“Yes, you do.” He stepped back, and the muscle in his cheek tightened. “Because if they knew the real you, they’d see the gentle nature you try so desperately to hide. The weakness, and you’d be prey instead of predator.”

I froze, gripping the knife tightly in my hand.

He stared at me for a long moment, daring me to throw it. I felt sweat dripping between my breasts, and my lungs heaved, trying to draw in enough air.

I was NOT prey.

With a desire that surpassed everything else in my life—I wanted to throw it, but I wouldn’t. As much as I wanted to kill him, my dumbass hadn’t given up on the slim chance that one day I’d win his approval… and maybe his love.

Most days, I hated myself as much as I did him.

He looked at me, almost as if he was disappointed. As if, by not throwing it I’d proved his point.

“Rerun it.”

I did.

When the session ended, it didn’t end with relief. It ended with rules, because everything did.

“Shower,” he said. “Ice your knees. Eat something with protein. Lights out by ten.”

I nodded as if I were a soldier receiving orders—that’s what I was. Not a daughter, but a soldier gearing up for combat.

Ben went back inside without saying another word.

I stood alone in the garage, the buzzing light above me, the knife now safely back in its drawer, my hands trembling from exhaustion and something worse.

Defeat.

I wanted to cry, but of course I didn’t.

There was no point in it. He wasn’t going to change anytime soon, and I had accepted that… mostly.

I wish Adrian were here.

I wish I could punch him in his beautiful face.

I was brimming with contradictions.

Checking my phone, which was face down on the bench, I saw I had three missed messages in the group chat about Friday’s football game.

A dozen snaps I hadn’t opened. A notification from the school portal—grades, attendance, and a ridiculous request from one of my teachers to set up a conference with Ben.

The single women in town had been after him ever since my stepmom died, with no luck. This stupid bitch wouldn’t be any different. I’d have to make sure she understood that.

And there it was, buried beneath the noise.

An email subject line: Academic Integrity Review Notice

My lungs forgot what they were doing.

For a second, the garage felt too small. The air was way too thin.

“Shit,” I mumbled, trying to think through the panic.

This was the kind of thing that got adults involved.

The sort of thing that got papers signed.

The type of thing that got Ben’s attention in a way I most definitely didn’t want.

The thing was, I was fairly sure that he already knew.

His questioning proved that.

But like everything else in my life, this was a test—a test to see if I could do what was necessary to cover my ass and survive by my wits alone.

Prove I wasn’t prey.

My fingers hovered over the screen.

I didn’t open it.

Not yet.

Because if I opened it, it became real.

And if it became real, I’d have to decide what I was willing to burn to keep Ben from doling out punishment.

Who I was ready to sacrifice.

I turned the phone over and stared at the dumbbell rack, the taped lines on the floor, the mat with sweat-darkened patches where my body had been just a few moments before.

Ben Calder didn’t raise a daughter.

He raised a survivor.

And survivors didn’t fail.

I swallowed hard, then walked into the house as if nothing had happened.

Like I wasn’t already at my burning point, on the verge of turning into nothing but ash.