NOBODY'S DAUGHTER

Jo's POV

The mat under my boots was already slick with sweat, and I hadn't even hit my finisher yet.

Three minutes into the biggest match of my life, and my body was doing that thing where it stopped listening to me on purpose. My lungs burned like I'd swallowed a fistful of gravel. My opponent, Renata, had me backed into the corner, and every camera in that empty arena was pointed straight at us like they already knew something I didn't.

This was my shot. One tryout match in front of the people who ran Meridian Wrestling Alliance, and if I didn't make it count, I'd be back to folding chairs in a VFW hall by Friday.

"You good?" Renata muttered, low enough that only I could hear it, her forearm pressed against my collarbone.

"Never better," I said, which was a lie so big I almost laughed at myself.

Something in the turnbuckle pad behind me gave a little, like it had been breathing this whole time and just exhaled. I felt it in my spine before I felt it anywhere else a soft, wrong kind of give where there should've been nothing but steel and stuffing.

I filed it away and kept moving. Because that's what I do. I file things away.

"Time," called the referee, tapping his wrist even though there was no clock. That was the signal thirty seconds left before they cut it for the executives watching from the office upstairs.

Renata whipped me off the ropes. I hit them harder than I meant to, bounced back, and my shoulder clipped the same corner again. That give was still there. Not enough to trip an alarm in most people's heads. Enough to trip one in mine.

I could've called time myself. Could've held up a hand and said something's wrong with the corner, give me a second. Wrestlers do that. It's allowed. Nobody would've blinked.

But somebody would've remembered.

They'd have remembered the new girl who stopped a tryout match over a feeling in her shoulder, and next time there was a spot open, they'd pick the girl who didn't stop for anything. So I swallowed it down along with the taste of copper in the back of my throat and reset my feet instead.

"Last exchange," the ref said. "Make it count."

Renata nodded at me, barely, the way wrestlers do when they're trusting you with their body for the next ten seconds. I nodded back, trusting her with mine.

I don't remember deciding to run at the corner. My legs just did it, the way they'd done it a thousand times in gyms that smelled like bleach and desperation, corners that had never once let me down.

This one did.

The turnbuckle pad folded wrong under my shoulder, too soft, too fast, like the padding wasn't there at all just bare steel underneath a layer of fabric doing nothing to stop it. My head snapped toward the post at an angle no neck is built to survive.

Everything went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound.

I felt my body twist not because I planned it, but because some older, dumber, more stubborn part of me refused to let this be how it ended, refused to let a folding chair circuit girl go out on a busted piece of company equipment nobody bothered to check. My shoulder took the hit instead of my neck. Pain went off like a flashbulb behind my eyes.

I hit the mat wrong. Hard. Wrong enough that for one full second I couldn't tell if I was still breathing or just remembering what breathing used to feel like.

"Jo!" Renata was over me fast, hands hovering, not touching, the way you're trained not to touch someone who might be really hurt. "Don't move, don't move"

"I'm fine," I said, which came out as more air than words.

"You are not fine, your head just about took a chunk out of that post"

The ref was already waving people over. Somewhere past the ropes I heard a chair scrape back hard enough to skid, and a woman's voice sharp, controlled, the kind of voice that's used to rooms going quiet when it speaks cut through the ringing in my ears.

"Get the medic. Now."

I turned my head, slow, testing it like a question I wasn't sure I wanted answered, and found the source of that voice standing at ringside. Older, put-together in a way that made the rest of us look like we'd rolled out of a laundry hamper, watching me with an expression I couldn't read at all. Not worry. Not exactly. Something more like she was doing math.

That was Odalys Kraft. I recognized her from every trade magazine I'd ever flipped through in a locker room, the way you recognize the face on money.

"Somebody check that corner," she said, not to me, to a man in a headset who was already climbing through the ropes. "I want to know exactly how that padding failed before this girl leaves this building."

Renata helped me sit up. My shoulder screamed. My neck, somehow, didn't not really, just a deep ache that told me how close it had come to being worse.

"You're lucky," Renata said quietly, watching my face for something. "Another inch and that would've been your neck instead of your shoulder."

"I know," I said, because I did know, because I'd felt it happen in that half second I still couldn't fully explain to myself.

The man in the headset knelt by the corner post, pulled back the torn edge of the pad, and went very still.

"Ma'am," he said, not looking up. "This isn't worn out. Somebody cut the padding foam clean through. This didn't fail on its own."

I heard him say it. I understood every word of it. And somehow none of it landed right, like my brain had decided it already had enough to carry tonight and wasn't taking on anything new.

Odalys's face didn't change at all. That was the part that scared me more than the corner had.

"Get her checked out," she said, turning away like the sentence he'd just said hadn't happened, like a cut turnbuckle in the middle of the biggest tryout of the year was a scheduling problem instead of the kind of thing that gets people killed.

I lay there on the mat, shoulder throbbing, staring up at ring lights too bright to look at directly, and thought about the thirty seconds I'd had to call time and didn't.

I thought about how close I'd come to being carried out of this building instead of walking out of it.

And underneath all of that, quiet and stubborn as ever, I thought: they still might sign me anyway.

That was the part of me I couldn't shut off. Not even now. Not even flat on my back with a stranger telling my new boss that somebody had rigged the corner to hurt me on purpose.