Chapter 7: Blood Pact
The private lounge in Zagreb hummed with a different energy now. It was the low thrum of legend, of old battles fought on green pitches, and older histories etched into the faces of the men who stood around her. When Vanja arrived, weaving through the crowd with a confidence that felt both innate and practiced, Mario Mandžukić broke into a broad grin and enveloped her in a bear hug that lifted her off the polished floor.
“There she is!”
Luka Modrić’s stare was more measured, a quiet astonishment that didn’t leave her face. Dejan watched from his seat by the window, a cold spear of jealousy lodging itself under his ribs. He knew that look. Every man in the room was giving her some version of it. The tailored dress, the way her hair fell—it was a statement she didn’t even have to make.
Vida sidled up to him, a beer in hand, his voice a low tease. “You brought Vanja Petrović here. You are insane.” He nodded toward the door. “Robert will be here soon, you know. Her uncle. Our captain. Robert Kovač. Or did you forget?”
Dejan shook his head, a tight, controlled movement. He hadn’t forgotten. He was trying, desperately, to navigate the minefield he’d willingly walked into.
The atmosphere shifted again when Marko Perković Thompson arrived. He moved with the relaxed gravity of a man whose voice was a national instrument. Greetings were exchanged, backs were clapped, and then his gaze, sharp and assessing, landed on Vanja. He paused, tilting his head.
“You look familiar,” he said, his accent a thick, rolling Dalmatian cadence.
Vanja turned, and when she answered, her voice was a perfect mirror of his own dialect, the consonants shaped by the same coastal stone and sea wind. “I’m sure I do.”
Dejan’s glass halted halfway to his lips. He’d heard her speak Croatian before, but this was different. This was roots. This was home. A home she wasn’t supposed to have.
Before the shock could settle, Vanja’s eyes flickered over Thompson’s shoulder. “Uncle Robert,” she said, softly.
The entire room seemed to pivot. Robert Kovač stood in the entrance, the captain’s aura still clinging to him even in a simple shirt. His eyes found Vanja, and a slow, surprised smile spread across his face. “Vanja. What a surprise.”
She crossed to him, accepting a brief, familial kiss on the cheek. “Dejan brought me,” she said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.
Her uncle nodded, his gaze momentarily finding Dejan’s across the room—a look that was neither approving nor disapproving, just deeply, profoundly observant.
Thompson’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Ah,” he said, the sound rich with understanding. “You’re Zoran’s daughter.” He studied her face, the lines around his eyes softening. “You look like your aunt. The resemblance is… striking.”
Vanja grinned, a flash of something unguarded and real. “Yeah,” she said, and the word carried a lifetime of stories in its simplicity.
The relaxed energy in the room seemed to condense around that simple admission. Thompson gave a slow, thoughtful nod, his gaze lingering on her features as if tracing the family lines. “She is a good woman, your aunt. We all went to the same school, you know, in Sibenik.”
Vanja’s polite smile didn’t reach her eyes, which had hardened to chips of jade. She sipped her sparkling water, the ice clicking softly against the crystal. “Oh, I know. She remembers.”
“Good memories, I hope,” Thompson said, leaning back.
“She says it was loud,” Vanja replied, her voice coolly conversational. “She especially remembers your concerts. All that singing about heroes, and battles, and…” She paused, letting a beat of silence hang in the hushed, attentive air of the lounge. “And betrayal. Unfaithful Serbian girls.”
Her light tone was a thin veneer over something razor-sharp. Dejan saw it the moment Thompson’s posture shifted from nostalgic to guarded. Vanja’s own posture was deceptively casual, one hip cocked.
“Or,” she continued, her gaze now level and direct, “half-Serbian, in her case. My aunt? She’s not your biggest fan, Marko.”
The hum of conversation died completely. The admission hung there, raw and unmistakable. Her mother’s sister, her Croatian aunt, despised this man’s anthems of national pride, of division. The personal had just gutted the political in one quiet, devastating statement.
Marko said nothing. His face was a closed door.
Around them, the players—Luka, Mario, Robert, who had come over to stand silently beside Vanja—were statues, caught between a history they revered and a woman embodying its painful, living contradiction. The air tasted of stale smoke and cold tension.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Vanja said, the same professional smile returning as she placed her glass on a side table. The finality in her voice left no room for argument. She didn’t look at Dejan as she turned and walked, unhurried, out of the lounge. The heavy door sighed shut behind her, sealing the stunned silence inside.
Dejan was moving before the latch clicked, pushing past Dominic and a startled Mario.
He found her a few paces down the empty, plush-carpeted hallway, leaning one hand against the wall, her head bowed. The light from a minimalist sconce glinted off the damp tracks on her cheeks. The composure she’d held like a shield inside had vaporized.
“Vanja.”
She flinched but didn’t turn. Her voice was thick and ragged. “I’m sorry. I thought I could do this. Be your guest. Smile.Listen to it. But I can’t.”
He didn’t reply with words. He stepped close, turning her gently to face him. He saw the Munich terrace flash in her eyes, that same collision of anger and grief. He framed her face in his hands and kissed her. It wasn’t gentle. It was an affirmation, a claiming, an answer to everything she hadn’t said.
“Come on,” he murmured, his lips still close to hers. His thumb wiped a tear from her jaw. “Let’s go home.”
They didn’t speak in the elevator or in the sleek black cab that sliced through Zagreb’s neon-lit arteries. Vanja stared out the window, her hand a white-knuckled fist in her lap. Dejan kept his hand on her knee, a steady, warm pressure that spoke of a shared, simmering defiance.
When the cab stopped, it wasn’t at his Zagreb flat, but on the historic Sljeme road overlooking the city’s twinkling grid. The cool night air, carrying the scent of pine from the mountain slopes, hit them as they stepped out. The city below them was a silent, sprawling constellation. The fight arena in Munich seemed a world away.
She walked to the stone safety wall, her dress whispering against the concrete. Dejan followed, unsure, the ghost of their Munich kiss a phantom heat on his skin.
Then she turned.
Her movement was sudden and fluid. One hand fisted in his shirt, the other braced against his chest, and she shoved him back against the cold, rough stone of the railing. He let her, his back hitting it with a dull thud. Her eyes were wild, catching the distant city light.
Her lips grazed his ear, and her whisper was pure Serbian, dark and intoxicating, a language of shared secrets and forbidden edges. “Show them.”
Her teeth dragged sharply over his jugular, a possessive, punishing sting. He gasped.
“Show them what happens when they sing about burning villages and their dumb, fucking wars,” she breathed, the words vibrating against his hammering pulse, “while your cock’s inside a half-Serbian girl.”
It was history weaponized into desire, a brutal, beautiful rebellion only they could understand. A growl, raw and animal, tore from his throat.
He kissed her then, seizing her mouth with a matching ferocity. It wasn’t an answer. It was a promise, one he intended to keep right here against the stone, with the lights of a divided city watching below.
He broke the kiss with a brutal shove of his own, spinning her around to face the void and the city’s glitter. The cold stone bit into her cheek. His body pressed the full, hard length of his arousal against the curve of her ass, pinned between him and the railing. One hand tangled in her hair, not to pull, but to anchor. To hold her exactly there.
“Is this what you want?” His voice was a ragged, Croat-chiseled blade in the dark, his mouth hot on her neck. “This filthy thing right now, with the whole of Zagreb down there?”
“Fuck, yes.” The words were a fractured whisper swallowed by the wind. “All they see is a story. I want to be just a body. Your body.”
His hand slid from her hair, snaking down her front. He didn’t fumble with the dress’s zipper; he just grabbed the fabric at her shoulder and tore. The sound of fine stitching giving way was shockingly loud. Cool air rushed across her exposed skin, and she cried out, not in protest, but in pure, adrenalized release. “Dejane”
“Shut up.” He spat the words, but his other hand, the one pressed over her stomach, was trembling. He cupped her breast through the lace of her bra, his calloused thumb scraping over the hardened peak. He dragged the lace down, exposing her to the night, and pinched her nipple hard. A jolt of sharp, crystalline pain-pleasure shot through her core. “They sing their songs. They mourn their fucking ghosts. And you get wet for the one they’d call their own”
His hand plunged beneath the ruin of her dress, past the waistband of her underwear. She was drenched. His fingers slid through her slickness with a crude, wet sound. “Christ, Vanja.”
He didn’t finger her. He pushed two inside in a single, brutal thrust, curling them upwards. Her back arched violently off the stone, a choked scream tearing from her lungs. “Oh, god.”
“Not god.” He worked his fingers in and out, the rhythm punishing, efficient. He scissored them, stretching her. “Just me. Remember that. It’s just my hand making you come on this wall.” He crooked his fingers, found the ridged spot inside her, and rubbed it with a merciless, focused pressure.
Her vision whited out at the edges. The city lights below blurred into streaking comets. Her climax hit her like a convulsion, a silent, breathless wave that locked her muscles and squeezed his fingers in a violent, fluttering pulse. He held her through it, his forehead pressed to her shoulder, his breath sawing in her ear.
As the last shiver wracked her, his hands withdrew. She heard the rasp of his zipper, the tear of a foil packet. He sheathed himself with rough, urgent motions. He didn’t push her underwear aside. He hooked his fingers into the lace and silk at her hip and ripped them apart.
The sound was final. A covenant.
He positioned himself, the blunt, thick head of his cock nudging through her soaked, sensitive folds. He paused, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise. There was a suspension, a raw stillness where the only sounds were their ragged breathing and the distant hum of the city they were defiling.
He didn't enter her slowly.
With a single, powerful drive of his hips, he filled her completely. The invasion was shocking, a breathtaking stretch that stole the air from her lungs. “Fuck,” he grunted, the word a burst of agonized air. He was so deep, so impossibly full, that for a second she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could only feel the burning, perfect invasion. He fit her like a lock turned after a century of rust.
He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He pulled back and slammed home again. The force drove her hips harder into the unforgiving stone. “That’s it,” he snarled, setting a punishing, rhythmic pace. Each thrust was a statement, a physical reclaiming of every poisoned word spoken in the lounge below them. The stone abraded the skin of her cheek, the cool metal of the railing dug into her thighs. The pain was grounding, necessary, a counterpoint to the brutal pleasure of him pounding into her, over and over.
His pace was relentless, every drive of his hips delivering her into the stone. She could feel the coiled, tattooed power of him, the athlete’s control unleashed into something primal. One hand gripped her hip, the other fisted in the torn remains of her dress at her shoulder, holding her upright, holding her open. The slap of skin on skin, the wet, rhythmic sound of their joining, was obscenely loud in the mountain quiet.
“You feel that?” he growled, his voice shredded. “Every fucking inch. Remember who’s giving it to you.”
She couldn’t form words. Her world had narrowed to the slam of his body into hers, the sting of cold stone, the building, coiling pressure deep in her belly. It was different from the sharp climax his fingers had wrung from her. This was deeper, slower, a tectonic build.
“Look at it.” He jerked her head slightly, forcing her bleary gaze down to the sprawling, illuminated city. “Look at it while I fuck you.”
The vulgarity, the command, shattered her last restraint. The visual—the serene, ancient city below, the brutal, animal reality of what they were doing above it—tipped her over. Her second orgasm ripped through her with a silent, jaw-clenched intensity, a deep internal pulsing that clutched at him, milking his cock in rhythmic, desperate waves.
He felt it, the frantic tightening of her around him. With a final, guttural curse, he hammered into her one last time and held there, buried to the hilt. His release was a hot flood inside the latex, a series of sharp, shuddering thrusts as he emptied himself. His body slumped over hers, a sheen of sweat making their skin slick where they were joined.
They stayed like that, welded together by sweat and come and the stark impossibility of what they’d just done. The night air cooled the fever on their skin. Gradually, the sounds of the world returned: a distant car horn, the rustle of pine needles in the wind.
He softened inside her, but didn’t pull out. He just rested his forehead against her torn dress, his breathing slowly evening. His hands, still on her hips, gentled from a grip to a hold.
Vanja’s mind, blank with physical overload, began to stir. The cold was seeping in. The ache in her muscles, the raw burn between her legs, the sting on her cheek from the stone. They were real, solid things in a world that had just tilted off its axis.
He finally moved, pulling out of her with a soft, wet sound. He turned her gently, his hands cupping her face. The fury, the performance, was gone from his eyes. What was left looked hollowed out, almost scared.
He didn't speak. He looked at her—really looked—at her torn dress, her smudged makeup, her trembling lips. His own jaw was tight.
HE LIFTS HER.