Chapter 11: The Slap and the Surrender
The silence of Vanja’s own apartment was a different creature than Niko’s. It wasn’t curated or menacing; it was hollow. The club-provided Audi was parked downstairs, a sleek monument to her new life, but up here, the boxes were only half-unpacked. Books were stacked in towers against the wall. Her cat, Baki, wove between her legs, purring a tentative welcome. She stood in the center of the living room, the ghost of Niko’s touch like a film on her skin, the phantom ache between her legs a persistent echo.
She peeled off her clothes and stood under a scalding shower until her skin was raw and pink. She scrubbed, but the feeling wasn’t of dirt. It was of a signature, a claim written in a language only her nerves understood. Wrapped in a towel, she checked her phone. Leonie had sent three updates about sponsorship logistics. Mats had sent a photo of himself and a teammate at a kit launch, smiling broadly. ‘Miss you, freak,’ read the caption.
She typed, ‘Miss you too,’ and sent it, the lie floating into the digital ether.
She didn’t miss him. She missed the idea of him, the sanctuary he was supposed to represent. But that sanctuary had become another enclosure, its walls papered with his expectations and his need for a certain story—the golden couple, conquering the world. Her story was darker, scribbled in margins he couldn’t read.
A fresh message appeared. From Joshua Kimmich. No greeting. Just an address in Grünwald and a time: 8 PM. ‘Film session. Be punctual.’
It was 7:15. Grünwald was a twenty-minute drive. This wasn’t a request. It was an order from her new captain, delivered with the same efficiency as his passes.
She dressed in dark jeans and a simple black sweater, pulling her damp hair into a tight bun. She applied no makeup. The face in the mirror was pale, the golden-green eyes fathomless and cool. She looked like someone who could handle a film session at a private address. She looked, she thought, like someone who had just paid two hundred thousand euros to a criminal and then let him fuck her over a sofa to secure her future.
Kimmich’s house was modernist and discreet, all clean lines and large windows overlooking a manicured garden. He answered the door himself, dressed in grey track pants and a hoodie, holding a tablet. He nodded, a minimal gesture. “Come in.”
He led her not to a home cinema, but to a sparsely furnished study. A large screen dominated one wall. A laptop was open on a desk. It smelled of lemon cleaner and fresh coffee.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to a chair. He remained standing, leaning against the desk. “We won a three-way fight for you. You understand what that means?”
“Pressure,” Vanja said, her voice steady.
“More than pressure. It’s a bet. On you. Every pass you miss, every loss of possession, every moment of hesitation… it’s a point against the people who pushed for this. Against me.” He picked up the tablet, swiped. A frozen image of the training pitch from that morning appeared on the large screen. It was a wide shot, showing her receiving Kimmich’s pass. “Here.”
He played the clip. She watched herself cushion the ball, turn, evade the lunging defender with that micro-feint. It looked graceful, effortless. He paused it. “Good. Instinctive. But look.” He zoomed in. “Your head. You’re looking at the ground. You’re reading the ball, not the field. In that league, against those defenders, that split-second of looking down is a death sentence. They will kill you.”
He switched to another clip, from her time at Basel. A gorgeous, curling shot from outside the box. He let it play, the ball rippling the net. Then he rewound. “You have three touches here. The first to control, the second to set, the third to shoot. In the men’s game, you get two. Maybe one. The time you take to make it pretty is time you don’t have.” He looked at her. “You’re not here to be pretty. You’re here to be efficient. Ruthless.”
Vanja felt a strange calm settle over her. This was a language she understood. Clean, analytical, devoid of subtext or possession. “Show me.”
For an hour, he dissected her game. He showed her spaces she didn’t exploit, passes she didn’t see, the fractional hesitations that would be punished. He was brutal and utterly precise. It was the opposite of Mats’s passionate, emotional coaching. This was surgery.
When he finished, he set the tablet down. “Your physicals are freakish. Your technique is, for the most part, superb. Your brain is the problem. You’re playing chess when you need to be playing war.”
“And you’re going to rewire my brain?” she asked, a slight edge to her voice.
“I’m going to try,” he said, meeting her gaze directly for the first time. “Because if you fail, it’s not just you who looks like an idiot. It’s the entire project. It’s me.” He walked to a small kitchenette off the study and poured two glasses of water. He handed her one. “Why are you here?”
The question, coming from him, felt different. “To play football at the highest level.”
“That’s the press release. Why are you here? In this room. Letting me pick apart your game. Taking this shit from the guys. Subjecting yourself to the microscope.” He took a sip of water. “There has to be a fuel. What is it?”
Images flashed: Niko’s hand on her throat. Dr. Keller’s speculum. The bank transfer confirmation on her phone. Mats’s face, blissfully unaware, smothering her with his love.
“I have something to prove,” she said, her voice low.
“To who?”
“To everyone.”
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. It wasn’t warm. It was approving. “Good. Hold onto that. Nurture it. Let it piss you off.” He set his glass down. “Training tomorrow is at seven. We’ll work on your first-touch patterns before the group session. Be on the pitch at six-thirty.”
He was dismissing her. She stood. The film session was over. It had been the most honest interaction she’d had in weeks.
She drove back through the Munich night, her mind whirring with tactical lines and spatial diagrams. When she parked, she saw the figure leaning against the wall by her building’s entrance before she recognized him. The leather jacket, the casual slouch. Mats.
Her stomach dropped.
He pushed off the wall as she approached. His smile was tired, edged with something she couldn’t place. “Surprise.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, too sharply.
The smile faltered. “I had a free day. Thought I’d drive down. See my girlfriend. Crazy idea, I know.” He stepped closer, reaching for her. “You didn’t answer my calls earlier.”
“Film session. With Kimmich. At his place.” She realized how it sounded as soon as she said it.
His face closed off. “At his place.”
“It was tactical. Private.”
“Private,” he echoed. He looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her severe bun, her bare face. “You look… intense.”
“It was an intense session.”
He nodded slowly. Then his hand came up, his fingers brushing her neck, just below her ear. She flinched. It was minute, but he felt it. His eyes narrowed. “What’s this?”
He angled his head. There, in the shadowed hollow just above her collarbone, was a faint, reddish mark. Not a bruise. A friction burn from the coarse weave of Niko’s sofa, from the relentless pressure of his body holding her down.
“It’s nothing,” she said, pulling back. “From training. A strap, maybe.”
Mats’s jaw tightened. He knew what a mark from a football kit looked like. This wasn’t it. This was something else. The silence stretched, charged with everything unsaid: his suspicions, her secrets, the vast, contaminated space between them.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said, turning toward the door.
He followed, silent. In her apartment, Baki wound around his legs, but he ignored the cat. He walked to the window, staring out at the city lights. Vanja stood frozen by the door, the key still in her hand.
“I love you, Vanja,” he said, his back to her.
“I know.”
He turned. His face was a mask of pained confusion. “Do you? Because sometimes it feels like you’re somewhere else entirely. On another planet. And I’m just… shouting into the void.”
The truth was a barbed lump in her throat. She said nothing.
He crossed the room in three long strides. His hands came up to cradle her face, but it felt less like a caress and more like an interrogation. “Look at me,” he pleaded. “Just tell me you’re here. With me.”
She looked into his blue eyes, so full of earnest hurt. She saw the future he’d painted for them—the glamour, the victories, the perfect, uncomplicated life. It was a beautiful lie. Her truth was a locked room full of dirty money and dirtier secrets.
“I’m here,” she whispered.
It was enough. His mouth crashed down on hers, a kiss born of desperation and doubt, trying to obliterate both. It was nothing like Niko’s calculated possession. This was raw, emotional greed. He kissed her as if he could consume the distance between them, as if he could kiss the other man right out of her memory.
She responded, her hands clutching at his shoulders, not in passion but in a kind of frantic anchoring. She pushed his leather jacket off, her fingers fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. He broke the kiss, breathing heavily, his forehead pressed to hers. “I need you,” he rasped. “I need to feel you.”
He picked her up, carrying her to the bed, still half-made from her morning. He laid her down and stripped her jeans and underwear off with a rough urgency, then his own. He didn’t pause, didn’t tease. He covered her body with his, his weight familiar and heavy. He was already hard, pressing against her thigh.
“Tell me you’re mine,” he demanded, his voice husky with emotion. His hand slid between her legs, finding her dry. He rubbed his fingers over her clit, his touch rougher than usual, more insistent.
She closed her eyes, summoning the ghost of the afternoon’s violation, the unwanted arousal that had betrayed her. Her body, ever the traitor, responded, a slickness gathering under his insistent circles. “I’m yours,” she breathed, the ultimate lie.
He positioned himself and pushed inside her in one long, deep stroke. She gasped, her inner walls stretching to accommodate him. He filled her completely, a different fullness than Niko’s painful, dominating invasion. This was a claim of the heart, or so he believed.
“Fuck,” he groaned, dropping his head to her shoulder. He began to move, slow and deep at first, then building to a frantic, pounding rhythm. “You feel so good. So perfect.” His thrusts were erratic, fueled by a anxiety that had nothing to do with pleasure. “Don’t leave me,” he panted into her ear, his breath hot. “Don’t you fucking leave me for him.”
The ‘him’ hung in the air, unspoken but understood.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, meeting his thrusts, trying to lose herself in the physicality of it. But she was split in two. One part of her was here, under Mats, performing the expected passion. The other part was floating above, watching, cold and clear. She saw the tension in his shoulders, the hurt in his eyes even as they squeezed shut in pleasure. She felt his cock driving into her, a blunt instrument of connection that couldn’t possibly bridge the chasm between their realities.
“Harder,” she heard herself say, a desperate attempt to feel something, anything, real.
He obeyed, his hips slamming against hers, the bedframe knocking the wall. The sounds were animalistic, grunts and slaps and the creak of wood. He shifted his angle, hitting a spot deep inside her that made her vision blur. A sharp, clinical pleasure radiated out, devoid of warmth.
“That’s it,” he moaned. “Come for me. Come on my cock. Let me feel you.”
She focused on the sensation, on the building pressure, twisting it into an act of will. She pictured Kimmich’s analytical gaze, Niko’s sneer, Leonie’s spreadsheets. She used them as fuel, clenching around him, chasing a release that felt more like an expulsion than a culmination. Her orgasm came in a silent, violent wave, her body arching sharply, her teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached.
He cried out, his own control shattering. He thrust twice more, deeply, grinding against her, and she felt the hot pulse of his release inside her. He collapsed, his sweat-slicked body pressing her into the mattress.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. He nuzzled into her neck. “See?” he whispered, voice thick with satisfaction and relief. “We’re okay. We’re perfect.”
Vanja stared at the ceiling, at a crack in the plaster she’d never noticed before. His weight was suffocating. His seed was leaking out of her, a warm trickle onto the sheets. She thought of the mark on her neck he’d seen, the mark he’d chosen, in the end, to kiss rather than question.
She was buried under the weight of all their lies. His lie of a perfect future. Her lie of presence. And deeper than both, her own truth: that she was using them all—Mats, Kimmich, Bayern itself—as tools to carve out a space where a man like Niko Komnenić could never touch her again.
But he already had. And the proof was drying on her thighs, under the man who loved her.
“Yeah,” she whispered into the dark, her hand coming up to stroke his damp hair. “Perfect.”
The word hung in the dark room, a thin veneer over the fault line beneath them. Mats’s breathing evened into sleep, his arm a heavy weight across her ribs. Vanja watched the digital clock on her nightstand tick from 2:17 to 2:18, each minute a grain of sand burying her. His warmth felt like a containment field.
She slipped out from under his arm, the cool air hitting her sweat-damp skin. In the bathroom, she scrubbed herself clean again, watching the water swirl down the drain. Her reflection was pale, hollowed out. She pulled on a black tracksuit, grabbed her keys, and left the apartment without a sound.
She drove without a destination, the city’s night-time arteries flowing empty. Her hands tightened on the wheel. The memory of Kimmich’s clinical dissection fused with the phantom sensation of Niko’s hands, of Mats’s desperate thrusts. They were all pulling her apart, each claiming a different piece. She needed a center. She needed to reclaim a piece for herself.
The hotel was the same, a monolith of steel and glass. She didn’t call. She just walked through the lobby at 3 AM, her sneakers silent on the marble, and took the elevator to his floor. She knocked on the suite door, three sharp raps.
He opened it after a moment, dressed in dark lounge pants, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. No surprise touched his features. “You keep banker’s hours,” he said, his voice a low rasp.
“We need to talk,” she said, pushing past him into the suite. The city glowed beyond the windows, a false dawn of neon and sodium light.
“Do we?” He closed the door and leaned against it, watching her pace. “Your bank transfer cleared. Our business is concluded.”
“It’s never concluded with you.” She stopped, turning to face him. “You own a piece of me now. I want to know the rules.”
He took a slow sip of his drink. “There are no rules. Only consequences.”
A hot wire of anger snapped inside her. She crossed the room in two strides, her hand flashing out. The slap cracked through the silent suite, snapping his head to the side. The glass didn’t even wobble in his hand.
He turned his head back slowly. A red bloom spread on his cheek. He set the glass down on a side table with deliberate calm. Then his hand shot out, catching her wrist in a vise-like grip. He yanked her forward, his other hand tangling in her hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat.
“Feel better?” he whispered, his breath hot against her skin.
She spat in his face.
He didn’t flinch. He stared at her, the spit sliding down his cheekbone. A dark, terrifying smile broke across his features. He dragged her, stumbling, to the large leather sofa and threw her down onto it. She scrambled up, but he was on her, his body a cage of muscle and intent.
His mouth was on hers, a brutal, claiming kiss that tasted of whiskey and violence. She bit his lip again, and he grunted, pulling back to look at her. Blood welled on his lower lip. He wiped it with his thumb, then smeared it across her mouth.
“You want rules?” he growled, his hands ripping at the zip of her tracksuit top. “Here’s one. You come to me, you get what you deserve.”
He shoved the fabric off her shoulders, pinning her arms. His mouth went to her breast, sucking hard through the thin fabric of her sports bra, his teeth scraping her nipple. A sharp, unwanted lance of pleasure shot through her. She cursed, writhing under him, but he used his weight to still her, one knee forcing her legs apart.
He tore at the waistband of her tracksuit pants, yanking them and her underwear down to her thighs in one rough motion. The cool air hit her exposed skin. His hand slid between her legs, his fingers pushing inside her without preamble. She was wet, a traitorous slickness that enraged her.
“See?” he hissed, his fingers curling, scissoring inside her. “Your body knows the rules even if your mouth denies them.”
“Fuck you,” she gasped, her hips lifting off the sofa against her will, seeking the pressure of his hand.
“That’s the idea.” He withdrew his fingers, undid his own pants, freeing his cock. It was thick, fully hard, jutting aggressively. He spat into his palm, slicking himself, then positioned the blunt head at her entrance. He didn’t enter her. He waited, his eyes locked on hers, making her feel the exact point of potential invasion.
“Say it,” he demanded.
She glared, her chest heaving. He pressed forward, just an inch, a burning, stretching fullness. She sucked in a breath.
“Say you want it.”
She shook her head, clamping her jaw shut. He pushed another inch, a slow, excruciating conquest. Her inner muscles fluttered, gripping him. A low moan escaped her, humiliating and raw.
He moved then, withdrawing and slamming back into her to the hilt in one vicious stroke. She cried out, a ragged sound ripped from her throat. He set a punishing rhythm, each thrust a deliberate, deep violation. The sofa creaked violently with the force of it. He fucked her with a focused, relentless aggression, his hands pinning her hips, controlling every fraction of her movement.
“This is what you came for,” he panted, his voice thick. “This is the only thing that makes you feel real. Not your pretty boyfriend. Not your fucking football. This.”
He was right. The pain, the shame, the sheer physical overwhelm—it scorched away everything else. The calculations, the fears, the performance. There was only the brutal, piston-like drive of his cock inside her, the slap of skin, the guttural sounds tearing from both of them.
She came suddenly, a seismic convulsion that clamped down around him, milking his length. Her vision whited out. He swore, his rhythm breaking, and with three final, brutal drives, he emptied himself into her, a hot, pulsing flood that filled her. He collapsed on top of her, his weight driving the air from her lungs.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of their labored breathing. The room stank of sex and sweat. He softened inside her, a tender, mocking reminder. He finally rolled off, lying beside her on the ravaged sofa.
She stared at the ceiling, tears of fury and release leaking from the corners of her eyes into her hairline. He shifted, pulling her against him, his arm heavy across her stomach. His other hand gently brushed the hair from her damp forehead.
“I hate you,” she whispered, the words stripped of all heat, leaving only a cold, flat truth.
He turned his head, his lips brushing her temple. “I know.”
He held her tighter, his face buried in her hair. His next words were so quiet she almost didn’t hear them, muffled by her golden strands.
“I hate me too.”
They lay there in the wreckage as the first grey light of dawn bleached the sky behind the city skyline. Her mind, clear and terrifyingly calm, began to plot. Mats was a shield. Kimmich was a weapon. Niko was the dark fuel. And she would use them all to burn a path so bright, no one would ever dare claim her again.