Chapter 4: The Bloody Truth
The air in Mike’s office tasted sterile, like filtered vacuum-sealed nothing. Dejan stood just inside the doorway, his training kit damp with sweat from the pitch, feeling absurdly large and out of place among the clean lines and bland abstract art. Mike gestured to a chair with a plastic smile.
“Take a seat, Dejan. This won’t take long.”
“What’s this about?” Dejan remained standing, arms crossed. His instincts were prickling. HR calls were never good. They were either boring or bad.
Mike leaned back, steepling his fingers. “It’s about Dr. Petrović. She’s resigned. Effective immediately.”
The words didn’t land right. They bounced, meaningless, off the surface of his brain. “What?”
“She tendered her resignation about an hour ago. Clean break.”
A cold wash started in Dejan’s stomach, spreading outwards. “Why?”
Mike’s smile tightened at the corners. “That’s her private business. But, given the… circumstances… I wanted to assure you personally that the situation is fully handled.”
“What circumstances?” Dejan’s voice was low.
“The report of misconduct,” Mike said smoothly, as if discussing a minor scheduling conflict. “The one detailing your interactions in the tunnel and in her office. It’s been reviewed. With her departure, the matter is considered closed. No further action will be taken.”
Silence. The hum of the air conditioner filled the room. Dejan replayed the words. Report of misconduct. She’d filed a report? After his apology? A sick, twisting feeling coiled inside him—betrayal, then immediate, shameful guilt. She’d been right not to trust his apology. Why would she? Look at what he’d done.
But then Mike kept talking. “Frankly, it’s for the best. Her perspective seemed… fraught. A bit too personal. The legal team felt her account might lack necessary objectivity, given the apparent mutual antagonism.”
The coil tightened. “Legal team?”
“Just a review. Standard procedure when allegations involve a key asset.” Mike spread his hands. “The point is, you’re in the clear. We’ll manage any external narrative. Her credibility is already… well, let’s just say a disgruntled employee who quits so abruptly doesn’t hold much water. We’ll be able to discredit anything she might try to say publicly.”
The pieces slammed together with a brutal, metallic finality. They hadn’t just accepted her resignation. They’d weaponized it. They were planning to discredit her. To paint her as unstable, biased, unprofessional. To protect him. The asset.
The shame wasn’t hot anymore. It was icy, settling in his bones. He saw her in the corridor, the unshed tears glazing her golden-green eyes. You’re right. I don’t. She hadn’t filed a report out of spite. She’d walked away because the entire system was rigged against her truth. And they were already polishing the lies to cover the hole she left behind.
“I never saw any report,” Dejan said, his voice dangerously calm. “Who filed it?”
Mike’s composure flickered for a microsecond. “It was a… procedural filing. From within the department. To protect the club.”
“From me.”
“From for you, Dejan. There’s a difference.” Mike adjusted a pen on his desk. “The main thing is, it’s over. You can focus on football.”
Dejan took a step forward, his shadow falling across Mike’s polished desk. “Does Jürgen know? About her leaving? About this… report?”
“The manager has been informed of her resignation, yes. The internal details are an HR matter. He trusts us to handle them.”
He could picture it. Klopp getting the sterile, sanitized version. Petrović chose to leave. Personal reasons. We wish her well. No mention of pinned bodies, of legal insinuations, of scorched earth PR strategies. The Boss, who believed in the mental side of the game, who’d hired her, would just see an empty chair and a broken process.
Dejan felt a roar building in his chest, a chaos of fury and self-disgust. He had asked for minimal contact. He had been a bastard. He had apologized, too late, and thought that was the hard part. But this? This quiet, bloodless execution by a man in a cheap suit was a thousand times worse. He was complicit. His value had been used as a cudgel to silence her.
He turned without another word and walked out. Mike called his name once, a faint, fading sound. Dejan didn’t stop.
He moved through the corridors on autopilot, a storm contained in a human shape. Players and staff glanced at him, saw his face, and quickly looked away. The usual post-training banter died in his wake. He needed space. He needed to not be here.
His apartment was cold when he entered. The floor-to-ceiling windows showed a bruised, twilight sky over the Mersey. He stood in the middle of the vast, empty living room, the trophies on the walls gleaming dully in the reflected city light. The silence was a physical weight. He replayed Mike’s words. Discredit anything she might say.
His phone buzzed on the kitchen island. A message from his agent: Heard the psych is gone. Good riddance. Focus on the derby.
He stared at the screen. Good riddance. The narrative was already being written in the margins. He threw the phone. It hit the sleek leather sofa and bounced to the floor with a dull thud.
He poured a whiskey, didn’t drink it. He paced. The apology he’d given her on the training pitch felt cheap now, a counterfeit coin. He’d spoken to her as if the biggest problem was the mood in the dressing room. He’d offered a personal truce while the machinery of the club was already grinding her down. He’d been an arrogant fool. Worse, he’d been blind.
He saw her holding that stupid little plant, walking out. She’d known. She’d seen the trap closing and chose to walk through the only exit left, dignity intact.
He had to talk to Klopp.
—
Melwood was quiet, the day’s training long finished. A single light was on in the manager’s office, a warm pool in the darkening complex. Dejan didn’t knock. He pushed the door open.
Klopp was at his desk, hunched over a tablet, glasses perched on his nose. He looked up, didn’t seem surprised. “Dejan.”
“Boss.”
“You look like you have eaten a bad fish. Sit.”
Dejan stayed standing. “You know she quit.”
Klopp took his glasses off, slowly. “Ja. Mike told me. Very sudden. Unfortunate.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“He said it was for personal reasons. That it was…clean.” Klopp’s keen blue eyes studied him. “You are telling me it was not clean.”
“They filed a misconduct report. Against me. For the tunnel. For her office.” The words were ash in his mouth.
Klopp’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “And?”
“And they used it to push her out. Mike just told me they’re going to ‘discredit’ her if she talks. They called it managing the narrative.” The rage finally found a crack in his voice. “I was the circumstance, Boss. My… my behaviour. They made her the problem.”
Klopp leaned back, exhaling a long, weary breath. He rubbed his forehead. “Scheiße.”
“You didn’t know.”
“No. I know now.” Klopp’s voice was quiet, but it filled the room. “What did you do, Dejan? In her office.”
Dejan looked at the floor, at the worn carpet. He forced the memory to the surface: the rage, the frustration, the cool metal of the cabinet against his knuckles, her body trapped, the fear in her eyes he’d refused to see. “I pinned her. Against the filing cabinet. I shouted. I… I put my hands on her.” The admission felt like pulling shrapnel from his own flesh.
Klopp was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was flat, drained of its usual energy. “This is not acceptable.”
“I know.”
“No. You do not know. Not fully.” Klopp stood up, walking to the window overlooking the dark training ground. “I brought her here because she is brilliant. Because minds are as important as muscles. And you… you treated her like a provocateur. Like an enemy because of where her grandparents are from? Because of a flag?” He turned, his face grim. “This is small. This is the thinking of a small, frightened man.”
Each word was a lash. Dejan took it. He deserved it.
“And now,” Klopp continued, “because you are important to this team, the club wishes to sweep it under the rug. To make her disappear and to make you… clean again. This is also not acceptable.”
“What do I do?” The question was barely a whisper.
Klopp came back to the desk, planting his hands on the cluttered surface. “First, you will not speak to Mike again about this. You will not speak to the legal people. Second, you will tell me everything. From the beginning. No bullshit.”
And Dejan did. He told him about the tunnel, the ‘četnik’ slur he’d thrown and instantly regretted. He told him about the Instagram video, her coldness afterwards, his own stupid provocation in the lab. He told him about the apology in the dome, and how he thought, stupidly, that it might be a start.
When he finished, the room was thick with silence. Klopp had listened, unmoving.
“You owe her more than an apology,” Klopp said finally. “You owe her a… a reckoning. And the club owes her the truth. But she is gone. And the truth is now a messy legal thing.” He sighed, the weight of the institution pressing down on his shoulders. “I will talk to Mike. I will make it clear that any strategy to smear her name is off the table. That is the minimum.”
“She’ll still be gone,” Dejan said, the hollow feeling expanding in his chest.
“Ja. She will.” Klopp fixed him with a stare that felt like an x-ray. “This is your lesson, Dejan. This is the cost. You carry this. You play with this weight. You understand what your pride, your temper, your… your history… has cost this club, and that woman. You use it.”
Dejan gave a single, sharp nod.
Klopp picked up his glasses, put them on, and turned back to his tablet. The conversation was over. “Go home. Train tomorrow. Be better.”
Dejan walked out, the door clicking shut behind him. The corridor was dark, empty. He felt scraped raw, exhausted. But beneath the shame, a clear, cold purpose was hardening. Klopp would handle the club. He would stop the lies from being manufactured.
But that wasn’t enough. It was a defense, not an amends.
He got into his car but didn’t start the engine. He sat in the dark parking lot, the only sound his own breathing. He pulled out his phone, scrolled through old club emails, and found it. Her professional contact. The one she wouldn’t use anymore.
He typed a message, deleted it. Typed another.
Vanja. It’s Dejan. I know you left. Mike told me everything. About the report. About what they planned to do. I’m sorry. That’s not enough, but I am. I didn’t know.
He stared at the screen. It was pathetic. Useless.
He added one more line.
I need to see you. To say this properly. Not for the club. For me.
He pressed send before he could think better of it. The message whooshed away into the void, a tiny digital flare in the dark. He had no idea if she’d even read it. No idea if she’d block the number. No idea where she was.
He started the car, the engine growling to life. The headlights cut twin swaths through the darkness. He had nowhere to go but forward, carrying the weight.
He had nowhere to go but forward, carrying the weight.
His message to Vanja sat in the digital ether, unanswered. The blue ticks of WhatsApp never appeared. It remained a single grey checkmark, a silent monument to his own irrelevance to her now.
Two days later, Jurgen Klopp’s name flashed on Vanja’s screen in her temporary London flat as she packed a single suitcase. She let it ring to voicemail. He called again. She answered on the fifth ring, her voice carefully neutral.
“Jurgen. Hello.”
“Vanja.” His voice was a rasp of genuine concern, cutting through the formal distance. “Please. Tell me why you quit. What happened?”
She looked at the half-empty room, the stripped bed, the plant he’d given her wilting on the windowsill. The truth—the filing cabinet, the planned discrediting, the cold, institutional betrayal—was a tangled knot she couldn’t give him. He was part of the machine, even if he didn’t know its gears.
“A misalignment,” she said, the clinical term tasting like chalk. “Professionally. It wasn’t the right fit. I’ll probably return to Germany. My father will be able to find me a job.”
The silence on his end was heavy. He wasn’t a man fooled by corporate jargon. “This is about Dejan.”
“It’s about many things.” She closed her eyes. “Please don’t ask more. It’s done.”
Another pause. “If this is what you need. The door is not locked, Vanja. Not from my side.”
“Thank you, Jurgen. For everything.”
She hung up. The notification for Dejan’s text glowed beneath Jurgen’s contact. I need to see you. Her throat tightened. He needed to see her. Like hell he did. It was guilt. A rich man’s apology to soothe his own conscience. That was all. She deleted the message, blocked the number. Then she sat on the floor amidst the packing boxes and let the tears come, hot and silent and furious. They left salt tracks on her cheeks that dried into stiff, cool lines in the draft from the window.
An hour later, she wiped her face with the sleeve of her hoodie, stood up, and zipped the suitcase shut. She left the plant behind.
—
The next morning at Melwood, the rain was a cold, relentless drizzle. Dejan was lacing his boots when Klopp walked into the changing room and dismissed the lingering physio with a nod. The manager’s face was grave.
“Dejan. A word.”
They stepped into the boot room, the smell of leather and damp turf clinging to the air. Klopp leaned against a rack of spare studs.
“I spoke to Vanja.”
Dejan’s heart hammered against his ribs. “And?”
“She’s gone.” Klopp met his eyes, his expression unsparing. “She’s gone back to Germany, Dejan.”
The finality of it was a physical blow. He’d known, but hearing it from Klopp made it real. The space she’d occupied in the club, in his own tangled thoughts, was now officially, permanently vacant. A curse, vicious and guttural in Croatian, tore from his lips. He turned and slammed his palm against a metal locker, the boom echoing in the small room.
Klopp didn’t flinch. “She gave me nothing. ‘Misalignment.’ A polite word for a broken thing.”
“My fault,” Dejan muttered, staring at the dent in the locker door.
“Yours. The club’s. Mine.” Klopp sighed. “It does not matter whose fault it is now. She is not here.”
Dejan nodded, the weight settling deeper, becoming part of his anatomy. He trained that day with a furious, focused intensity that left the younger players wary. He channeled the shame into every tackle, every sprint. It was the only outlet he had.
—
He needed to find her. The impulse was immediate and nonsensical. Find her where? Say what? He had no address, no city, only the vastness of Germany. His agent laughed when he mentioned a private contact search. “For what? To get sued? Let it lie, Dej.”
So he didn’t. Not yet.
He carried the weight through matches, through press conferences where he gave bland, clipped answers. The team won, lost, drew. Life became a monochrome routine of training, matches, and the constant, gnawing absence of resolution.
Then, a month later, a thick, embossed envelope arrived at his apartment. An invitation. A private fight night in Munich, organized by Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipović. A charity event, but really a night for legends and their circles: a Slovenian prospect versus a Croatian veteran. Balkan pride on display in a steel cage.
He held the cardstock. Munich. A three-hour flight from Liverpool. Vanja’s father was someone connected to that old warrior network. Cro Cop knew everyone. It was a thread, gossamer-thin and probably severed.
It was pathetic. She wouldn’t be there. The odds were astronomically against it. Yet, it was a step closer to her geography, to her world. A direction. He texted his assistant: Book me a flight to Munich for the 18th.Discreet.
—
In Dortmund, Vanja sat in her parents’ sun-drenched kitchen, the smell of strong coffee and peppermint tea filling the air. Her uncle, Niko Kovač, former Bayern Munich manager and captain of the Croatian national team, stirred sugar into his cup. His gaze was analytical, coach-like.
“So, Vanjice,” he said, using the affectionate diminutive. “Why did you quit Liverpool?Really. The truth doesn’t have to leave this table.”
Her mother paused, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her father, Zoran, leaned back in his chair, his presence still commanding despite his retirement. Vanja felt the weight of their collective, concerned scrutiny.
“No good reason,” she said, keeping her voice light. “I missed home. I disliked the English mentality. The rain.” She offered a small, practiced smile.
Niko wasn’t buying it. He snorted softly. “I could have spoken to Jürgen. And to Dejan Lovren. I used to be his captain, you know. Before I retired, in the national team.”
At the name, a jolt went through her, but she mastered it. She nodded, her face a smooth mask betraying nothing. “It’s handled, Uncle. Really.”
Zoran Petrović grunted, a sound that conveyed both skepticism and a decision to let it be. He pushed his chair back. “Enough of this sad talk. There is a fight tonight. Mirko invited us. In Munich. Come with us. You need to go out. See people. Breathe.”
Vanja started to form a refusal. She wanted her quiet room, her books, the slow process of stitching herself back together.
“Vanja,” her father said, his tone leaving no room for debate. It was the voice that had guided her through childhood scrapes and professional doubts alike. One did not say no to Zoran Petrović, brother of the late Dražen, a legend in his own right.
She looked at her mother, who gave a slight, encouraging nod. The walls of her solitude were being gently, firmly, dismantled.
“Alright,” Vanja said, surrendering. “I’ll come.”
—
The venue in Munich was a symphony of low light, testosterone, and expensive cologne. The roar of the crowd was a contained, polite thunder compared to a football stadium. Dejan sat near the front, a cap pulled low, nodding at familiar faces from the Balkan sports aristocracy. His eyes incessantly scanned the crowds in the VIP tiers opposite, a futile exercise in a sea of dark suits and gleaming dresses.
He saw Mirko, a hand clapped on his shoulder, a quick exchange of pleasantries. He saw Niko Kovač across the way and felt a stupid leap of hope. But the former captain was with a group of men, no younger woman beside him.
Then, just before the main event, a group entered the tier to his far left. Zoran Petrović, unmistakable with his stern, proud bearing. A woman—Vanja’s mother, perhaps. And then, her.
Vanja.
She was wearing a simple black dress, her hair falling in loose waves. She was listening to something an older man next to her was saying, a faint, polite smile on her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. She looked unchanged, and yet completely different. Here, she was not Dr. Petrović. She was someone’s daughter, a girl from their world, surrounded by its protections.
His breath caught. The pathetic gamble had somehow, impossibly, paid off. The weight in his chest shifted, transforming into a frantic, electric urgency.
He didn’t think. He stood, ignoring the curious glance from the sports director beside him, and began to move. He had to weave through tables, around waiters carrying trays of champagne. His path was a direct, intercepting line towards the VIP section where she stood, a world away. The crowd’s roar for the entering fighters built around him, but he heard none of it. His entire universe had narrowed to the space between him and her retreating back as she followed her father to their seats.