Scarlet thread | Jenlisa

chapter 1

Third Person POV:

They say money can’t buy love.

But money can buy silence. It can buy devotion, curated masks, entire symphonies of performance.

It can commission personas—tailored, gleaming, polished until they dazzle like diamonds under artificial light.

It can bend reality like a mirage, soften truth like velvet, and rewrite the rules of affection until obsession masquerades as care.

Love is pure. Money is potent. And in the right—or wrong hands, it becomes something far more dangerous.

This is not a love story.

This is a story of obsession.

Of two girls:

Jennie Kim.

Lalisa Manoban.

And the prison gilded as paradise:

École d’Étoiles.

École d’Étoiles perched high above the Côte d’Azur, veiled in fog and forgotten myths.

The school was an ancient monolith—a cathedral carved into the bones of a cliff, once a convent for plague victims, later a royal asylum, now a boarding school for heiresses who whispered secrets instead of prayers.

Its walls bled history. Crimson ivy bloomed like bruises across the stone.

Turrets loomed like spires from a vampire's castle. No clocks, no digital bells.

Only the soft chime of wrought-iron gongs and the hush of secrets trailing in embroidered skirts.

Jennie Kim ruled this realm.

She did not sleep in the dormitories. Her quarters were sealed within the Black Wing, an annex once used to house dying nobility.

Her suite was a symphony of old wealth and eerie glamour: obsidian velvet, dusty chandeliers, moonstone mirrors that fogged when she cried.

Bookshelves bore titles in dead languages. Her bed, carved from onyx, groaned like a shipwreck when she turned in her sleep.

She was born into art theft, sculpted by inheritance.

Her mother curated stolen antiquities.

Her father was a ghost in offshore accounts and encrypted voicemails.

Jennie was raised like a Fabergé egg—delicate, lethal, and designed to be envied.

To the students, she was not a peer. She was a presence. A gravity. A myth wrapped in silk.

Monday arrived on thunderclouds.

Jennie was sat in the observatory—a turret overlooking the violent sea.

Storm light flickered through stained glass, staining her teacup bloodred.

While Rosé played the cello nearby, eyes half-closed, bow gliding like memory over strings.

It was peaceful. Almost sacred.

Until the gates groaned.

A car. Foreign. Silent.

From it stepped a girl. Combat boots. Weathered duffel. No entourage, no hesitation. She walked like a ghost who had chosen to come back.

Tall. Hair ink-dark. Eyes like shuttered windows.

Jennie sat forward, tea forgotten.

“Who’s that?” Rosé asked softly.

Jennie didn’t answer. She was already gone—mentally tracing the girl's posture, memorizing her stillness.