Free A Leap in the Dark (Assassins of Youth MC Book 2) by Layla Wolfe Page A

along with almost every other Lost Boys’ parents. Every parent who threw their son to the wolves. This is why a lot of us learn to feel no emotion. I’m usually pretty emotionless, which is why I’m thinking maybe I can deal with Gideon’s work inside the compound. Yesterday I had to face this Parley Pipkin assbite who was one of the men in on the ass-kicking I received from Zelpha Pratt’s dad. Like it takes ten men to kick the ass of one teenager. I did all right, staring him in the fucking face.”
    “You refrained from shooting him, anyway. That’s admirable.”
    I hadn’t told anyone other than Gideon about Ladell Pratt yet. Deloy probably suspected that he was one of my tormentors, but was polite enough not to bring it up. “Fifteen years of controlling my emotions has taught me well. That’s why I like your scientific way of looking at things. We have more in common than you might suspect. Emotion is a defect in a perfectly logical machine.”
    “No, no, not at all,” she cried, loud enough for Nana to hear. I moved closer to her, taking her by the upper arms to guide her into the shadows of the kitchen wall, farther from Nana’s bedroom. “Reason alone, without human emotion, has created more wretchedness than a zealot’s crusade.”
    “You haven’t lived in Cornucopia.”
    “Watching a Shakespeare performance informs us more about the nature of jealousy, how it can infiltrate a man’s life and ruin his marriage, than any textbook ever could. Harriet Beecher Stowe helped rouse society against slavery more powerfully than any spreadsheet. Dickens did more to prevent child abuse and institutional atrocity than any welfare society report.”
    I had to agree with her, because literature had replaced emotion in my life. I could feel through works of art, music, and writing. I allowed myself to feel outrage and indignation on their behalf—maybe because they were “made up” works of art, and somewhat remotely removed from my own carefully guarded cage of feelings. “Well, yes. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is still played in about five hundred languages in ten billion elevators throughout the world. I’m sure it’s managed to soothe many a savage beast. The photo of the napalmed Vietnamese girl or Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl photos still resonate in people’s hearts. Oaklyn, you don’t need to convince me. I feel deeply through others’ creations. It’s just my real life where I have trouble knowing how to feel.”
    “And that’s where you’ll miss out. You have to feel direct confrontations with people. There’s no sense in having pity for people if you’re being ruled by performance and profit. There’s no point in being charitable if you’re really not experiencing the compassion directly like a stab to your heart. I have a shitty boyfriend, I’ll be the first to admit that. But at least we have passion . We fight with passionate anger in our hearts.”
    “That’s useless to me,” I said. It sounded heartless even as I said it. When had I become such a callous, insensitive jerk? “I’ve had no close relationships with anyone in my life—ever. Not since Zelpha Pratt.”
    “You mean romantic. But you love your men.”
    I stood tall and proud. “I love my men like a protective mother hen. But passion with a woman? Nothing. At least you have that with your idiotic boyfriend.” It irritated me that she had even an idiotic boyfriend. I’d grown close to her the past week, strange to say. We sort of fit together like hand in glove, though I knew she loathed me for my business practices. I was used to that. I’d been denounced for my field of work for a long time now. It was only because we serviced such a large denomination of pious men and women in the community that no one had harassed us to move.
    She said, “Decisions such as whom to fall in love with, how to discipline a teenager, which beloved things to sacrifice, which dreams to follow or abandon—all of these choices should