Chapter 5: good girl
The walk across the gulf of the arena felt like wading through wet cement. Every step amplified the idiotic bravado of this move. He hadn’t planned a single word. The internal roar of ‘Vanja!’ was now a silent scream, trapped beneath the cage of his ribs.
Her uncle saw him first. Niko Kovač stood from his chair at the low table, a genuine, easy smile spreading across his face. “Dejan! Pa dobro! Good to see you here, son.”
All polite ex-captain grace. Dejan grasped the offered hand, the old comrade’s grip warm and firm. “Niko. Of course. When Mirko calls, you answer,” Dejan managed, his voice thankfully steady. His eyes flickered past Niko’s shoulder.
The man beside Vanja turned. Steel-grey hair, a posture that spoke of quiet, unshakeable authority. A face from the legends; softened by age, but the resemblance was unmistakable. Zoran Petrović. A bolt of pure awe, completely separate from Vanja, shot through Dejan. He was in the presence of basketball royalty, of a piece of his own sporting childhood.
“Dejan,” Zoran said, rising and offering his hand. The voice was a gravelly baritone. “Good to meet you. I am Zoran.”
Dejan’s grip was automatic. “It’s an honour, sir.” The words were sincere, weighted with history. Zoran Petrović. Dražen’s brother. A name synonymous with sacrifice and legend.
And then, as if guided by some gravitational pull beyond their fathers, her gaze lifted.
She was not looking at Zoran’s extended hand, or Niko’s smile. She was looking past them, at him. The polite mask from moments before was gone. In its place was a flat, neutral assessment. He saw the faintest shadow of fatigue under her eyes. It made her seem more real, more human, and somehow more beautiful than the polished professional he’d intimidated at Melwood. His heart kicked against his sternum, a clumsy, painful thing.
Vanja.
He held his breath.
She gave a single, minute nod of acknowledgment, a motion so devoid of warmth it was arctic. Then she turned her attention back to the empty cage below, dismissing his entire existence as one might a waiter who’d brought the wrong wine.
The world tilted. His moment of awe curdled into a sharp, humiliating vertigo.
Niko, his eyes missing nothing, chuckled softly. He clapped Dejan on the shoulder, leaning in. His voice dropped, pitched low for their bubble amid the pre-fight murmur. “Well, I don’t know what you did to anger my niece,” he said, his tone light but his gaze keenly intelligent. “But, good luck with that, Lovren.” The words were a dismissal, a friendly warning, and an assessment all at once.
Dejan stood there, marooned. He muttered something—a farewell, an excuse—and retreated. The return journey to his seat felt ten times longer. He was acutely aware of every whispering laugh, every glance. He sat down, the roar of the crowd for the first fight a meaningless drone in his ears. He spent the next hour seeing nothing but the clean line of her shoulder as she refused to turn his way.
—
During the main event, she got up. He tracked the movement like a hawk. She murmured something to her father, who nodded without looking away from the fighters, and she wove through the tables towards a side exit marked for the terraces.
His body moved before his mind could reason with it. He gave it sixty seconds, then followed.
Outside, the Munich night was crisp, the city lights a distant, hazy glitter. The terrace was empty save for her, leaning against the cold metal railing, her back to the door. The muffled, rhythmic thump of the event bled through the walls. She didn’t turn.
“Vanja.”
She stiffened. He saw the tendons in her neck tighten. She didn’t face him.
He walked forward, stopping a few feet away, a respectful, cowardly distance. The silence stretched, broken only by a distant siren and the canned excitement from inside.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words were stones dropped into a deep, dark well.She laughed. It was a short, brittle sound with no joy in it, carried away on the night air. “You’re sorry.”
“I didn’t know,” he pressed on, hearing the stupidity even as he said it. “About your family. About your father. About your uncle.” The ‘heritage’ he’d tried to use as a bludgeon against her suddenly rendered him a childish fool in his own ears. He’d insulted Dražen Petrović’s niece. The thought was staggering in its own embarrassing dimension, separate from the deeper wrong.
She finally turned. Her face was pale in the artificial terrace light, her eyes luminous and hard. “Let me understand. You are sorry you offended Dražen Petrović's niece. Niko Kovač's niece. Zoran Petrović's daughter.” She enunciated each connection with icy precision. “Not me. If I was just some četnikuša, just Vanja with no precious Croatian connection, no famous uncles, no legendary father… you wouldn't be standing here. Your lawyer and Mike from HR would be convincing everyone I was a hysterical liar. So please, don’t insult me further with your sudden, selective remorse.”
Each word was a scalpel. She wasn’t shouting. She was clinically dissecting him, and he was letting her, because she was right. The Liverpool machine would have indeed done exactly that. His original, gut-churning shame upon hearing Mike’s plan was now compounded by a thousand layers of brutal truth.
He had no defence. He looked down at his hands, at the faint scar on his knuckle from the filing cabinet. “I went to Klopp,” he said, his voice rough. “After Mike told me. I told him what I did. Everything. I told him about the cabinet. About…pinning you. I told him to stop Mike. To stop the… the discrediting.”
She absorbed this, her expression unchanging. “And did he?”
“He said he would.” Dejan looked up, meeting her gaze. It felt like staring into a headlight. “He called it unacceptable. All of it. He was angry. With me.”
A faint flicker in her eyes, something other than glacial contempt. Not warmth, but perhaps the acknowledgment of a fact. Klopp’s integrity was a known quantity.
“Good,” she said, turning back to the railing. “That’s the minimum a decent person would do. It doesn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
“Why are you here, Dejan?”
The question hung in the cold air. The simple truth was the only thing left. “To see you. To say what I should have said in the lab that day. I was a prick. A stupid, arrogant, ignorant prick. The history… it was an excuse. I was pissed off, and you were a target. It wasn't about you being Serbian. It was about me being an asshole.” He took a step closer, his voice dropping. “And I am sorry I hurt you. Not because of who your father is. Because of what I did. To you.”
She was silent for a long time, staring out at the city. When she spoke, her voice was quieter, tired. “You believe that now. Maybe you even mean it. But you felt it then. The history wasn't just an excuse. It was the fuel. You saw me and you thought ‘četnik.’ That was your first, your realest thought.”
He couldn't deny it. The memory of the word in the tunnel tasted foul. “Yes.”
Another silence, deeper this time. “My grandfather fought for the Partisans,” she said, the statement simple, monumental. “He was a communist from Sisak. He believed in Yugoslavia. He lost two brothers. One to the Ustaše. One to the Chetniks.” She finally glanced at him, her profile etched against the light. “My other grandfather was a print hosue owner from Serbia who loved Charlie Chaplin and hated politics. he lost his father to ustase. he was also in partizans. They gave my mother cabbage rolls and taught her that nationalism was for small minds. She married a Croatian basketball player who grieved for his brother every day of his life, but who never, ever taught me to hate Serbs. That is my history. It’s messy, and it’s mine. You don’t get to use it as a cheap insult. You don’t get to reduce it to a fucking football chant.”
The weight of her words settled over him, heavier than any trophy. He had been playing with fanatical, childish slogans. She lived inside the complex, human reality.
“I know that now,” he whispered.
“Do you?” She faced him fully now. “Or do you just know you messed with the wrong family? That your little tantrum had bigger consequences than you bargained for?”
He held her gaze, forcing himself not to look away.“Both. The second one showed me the first one.” He ran a hand over his head. “When Mike said what they’d do… I felt sick. Not because of my reputation. Because it was wrong. And it was happening because of me. You quitting… it felt like a verdict. The only honest one.”
She studied his face, looking for the lie. He felt utterly exposed. His tattoos, his fame, his confidence—it was all just armour plating around a hollow, shameful core.
She let out a long, slow breath, a plume of white in the cold. The fight seemed to drain from her posture. “Okay.”
The word wasn't forgiveness. It was an endpoint. An acknowledgment that he’d finally said the right, true, pathetic thing.
“I won’t bother you again,” he said, the statement tasting of ash. It was the necessary, final thing to say. “I just… needed you to hear that. From me. Not through Mike. Not through Klopp.”
He turned to go, the heavy finality of it crushing his chest.
“Dejan.”
He stopped.
“Why did you come here tonight?Really? There are a hundred fight nights. You could have called Klopp for my father’s number if legacy was that important.”
He turned back. She was watching him, her head tilted. The anger was gone, replaced by a weary curiosity. This was the psychologist, slicing through the noise to the real question.
The truth spilled out, raw and unvarnished. “Because it was the only thread I had. A pathetic one. I knew your father was connected to that world. I thought… maybe. It was a stupid chance. I just needed to… see you. To stand near you and say it.” He shrugged, a helpless, defeated gesture. “That’s all.”
Vanja looked at him for another long moment. Then she gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. She looked back over the city. “My family is leaving in ten minutes. You should go back inside before my uncle comes to find me. He never liked late rounds.”
It wasn’t a dismissal. It was a ceasefire. A thin, fragile line of quiet drawn across the battlefield.
He hesitated, then nodded. “Goodnight, Vanja.”
“Goodnight, Vanja.”
He turned and walked towards the heavy steel door, the cold metal handle biting into his palm. The muffled roar from inside swelled as he pulled it open a crack, a warm gust of stale arena air hitting his face. He took one step across the threshold.
And then he heard it.
A sharp, choked inhale behind him.Then another. It was the sound of a breath fighting a losing battle. A soft, shattered gasp that unspooled into a quiet, ragged sob.
He froze. The door sighed shut behind him, sealing him back into the silent cold with her.
He turned back.
Vanja was still at the railing, but her shoulders were curved forward, one hand clamped over her mouth as if to physically cram the sound back inside. Her entire frame trembled with the effort of suppression.
“Vanja?”
“Go away.” The words were wet, muffled by her palm. She didn’t turn.
He didn’t move. He stood there, an intruder in her private wreckage, his own heart hammering a frantic, helpless rhythm.
“Leave me alone.” This time it was a plea, stripped raw. “Please.”
She was crying now in earnest, the tears she’d held back for a month—through his provocations, through Mike’s betrayal, through her own dignified exit—finally breaking free. They were silent, shuddering things that wracked her shoulders.
He crossed the space between them in two strides.
He didn’t ask. He simply turned her, gently pulling her stiff, resistant form from the railing, and wrapped his arms around her. She went rigid, a statue of frost and grief. Then, with a sound like something tearing deep inside her chest, she broke.
Her fists, clenched tight, came up between them but didn’t push him away. They pressed against his sternum as she buried her face in the rough fabric of his jacket. The sobs were no longer quiet. They were deep, guttural waves of exhaustion and humiliation and pain that she’d locked away to survive the professional slaughter. Each one shook them both.
He held her tighter, his cheek against her hair, smelling the faint scent of her shampoo mixed with the night air. His own eyes burned. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured into her hair, the words themselves a pathetic, inadequate vessel for what he felt. “I swear I didn’t know it would be like that. I swear. I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t answer. She just cried harder, her body finally surrendering to the weight she’d carried alone. Her tears soaked through his jacket, a warm patch against the chill. He just held on, an anchor in her storm, repeating the same useless, true words while the city lights blurred into streaked gold below them.