Chapter 1

In my last life, my fiancé, the zoo director, my best friend, and I were trapped at the safari park by a storm.

The water kept rising, and my best friend insisted we let every caged animal out.

I fought her on it. The park had lions, tigers, even a king cobra.

Once they were loose, how many people would die because of it.

When the storm ended, my best friend looked at the drowned beasts and cried until she could barely breathe.

My fiancé turned on me, his voice sharp.

"This is your fault for not releasing them. Do their lives mean nothing to you? How can you have no compassion at all?"

The livestream chat drowned me in curses, called me an animal, dug up my personal information, and mobbed me online without mercy. Some of it spilled into real life.

My father's company was boycotted across the whole internet and pushed to the edge of bankruptcy.

"Raising a daughter this cold-blooded, the father can't be anything decent either."

I tried desperately to explain that I had done it for everyone's safety.

But my fiancé didn't care. He tied me up and buried me together with the drowned animals.

"Go beg their forgiveness in hell."

He announced to the world that I had killed myself out of shame, and the whole internet celebrated.

When my father heard I was dead, the shock drove him to jump from a building.

My fiancé and my best friend seized the chance to grab my family's fortune, and lived free and easy.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the first day of the storm.

My best friend gripped my hand, her face all worry.

"Josie, go open all the cages. We can't let the poor animal babies drown."

I smiled and nodded, then turned and drove off through the night.

But if the two of them had so much compassion, then when the lions got hungry and started treating them as food, they could cry and beg me to save them.

......

Felicia Fox had barely finished telling me to go open the cages. Before I could even answer,

Arnold Henson's scolding hit me first.

"You won't even open a cage. Josephine Pruitt, how can you be so cold-blooded? Can't you learn to be kind like Felicia?"

I glanced at the unnatural flush on Arnold's face and sneered inside.

Arnold had always loved using Felicia to keep me down.

Felicia couldn't afford designer labels, so he called me wasteful and extravagant, forced me into cheap stall clothes.

Then he'd quietly slip my limited-edition dresses to her.

Felicia had no real skills and couldn't get into a good company, so he said going home to inherit the family business made me a good-for-nothing, and pushed me to build something from scratch on my own.

Meanwhile he and Felicia ran up my black card and opened this zoo in the name of protecting animals.

Drawing fat salaries, eating and drinking well.

Living this life over, I saw it all clearly.

These two were leeches fastened to me, sucking my money, and now they wanted my life too.

Seeing me stay silent, Arnold wanted to keep guilt-tripping me.

I cut him off.

"Fine. I'll go open the cages right now."

Arnold and Felicia exchanged a glance, the delight in their eyes impossible to hide.

I couldn't be bothered to look at them again. One more second near them made me sick.

I walked to the lion's cage. The water had already risen past the lion's paws.

The lion was starved down to skin and bone, its green eyes full of savagery as it paced restlessly back and forth in the water.

I opened the electronic lock, but I didn't dare pull the door open.

The lion had gone mad with hunger. The moment I opened that door, it could tear me to pieces right there.

Then something felt off. No one knew Arnold better than I did, and he had never been the kind of man who cared about animals.

To cut costs he fed these animals only once a day, spoiled scrap meat, and dressed it up as "hunger keeps them wild."

I couldn't stand it, so I often paid out of my own pocket to buy fresh meat as extra for them.

Why was he in such a rush to have me let the animals out today?

Then it hit me. Back when the zoo was being built, I'd worried something might happen to him, so I'd secretly installed a camera in his director's office.

I never told him, afraid he'd say I was a coward.

I pulled out my phone and opened the feed.

Arnold and Felicia were already wrapped tightly around each other, unable to wait.

Arnold was panting as he cursed me.

"That bitch Josephine, right at the crucial moment she shows up at the zoo out of nowhere, almost ruined everything for me."

Felicia leaned coyly against him.

"Good thing I'm clever. I found the excuse about releasing the animals to get her out of the way, or you'd have been in agony."

I was so furious I nearly threw the phone.

This pair of dogs rushing me to open the cages had nothing to do with compassion.

They just wanted me out of the way so they could hurry up with their filthy business.

I didn't hesitate anymore. I walked quickly to the other cages and opened every electronic lock.

Then I drove out of the zoo and sealed the main gate shut behind me.

At the gas station, I looked at the twenty-some missed calls from Arnold and Felicia on my phone, and a cold smile tugged at my lips.

I uploaded the video of them urging me to open the cages to the cloud.

The water was rising higher. Those animals would break through the cage doors soon enough. The two of them could wait to become their snacks.

But then I felt around in my handbag, and my heart went cold.

Why was the jade bracelet my mother left me gone.