Chapter 52

KAI

The slums were worse than I remembered.

I hadn’t been here in years, but the sight of it now turned my stomach. The air was thick with the stench of waste and decay, and the ground was a mix of mud, filth, and human waste. The slum dwellers huddled together in ragged clothes, their faces gaunt and pale, some of them wheezing and coughing as they drank thin, watery soup from cracked bowls. Flies buzzed around them, and the few children I saw looked skeletal, their eyes hollow.

This was the part of the Seven Isles my father had never cared about. He had poured all his resources into the capital, lavishing attention and wealth on the nobles and the elite, while the poor were left to rot in these wretched streets. He had claimed that maintaining the wealth of the capital was all that mattered, that the poor were a burden best ignored.

It was why all of the werewolves had such high regard for us. They knew that we had resources and could do whatever we wanted to do, but none of them kn