23. Lucky
Lucky
Lucky was sitting in the campus library when Jack ambushed him with a panicked look.
Black hair was a mess of frizz and his normally curated style looked haphazard as best, giving the impression Jack had come straight from home to crash into Lucky’s study time.
He was holding his phone like it was going to bite.
“What’s going on?” Lucky asked, half standing. Concern sat heavy on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure he could handle another emergency this month, but whatever had Jack frazzled was enough to scare him.
His answer was the phone being shoved into his chest. On the screen was a video from some social media site.
It spun across beautiful, familiar beaches and dove under the waves to show off Sirena Reef.
He’d know that pristine rainbow coral anywhere.
Lucky sucked in a breath, fingers tapping the screen to freeze it.
In the blurry blue abyss on screen was the unmistakable shape of the Paradise Leatherback.
“They’ve never been that close to Tesoro, right?” Jack smiled wide.
“You didn’t come all this way to show me this…” Lucky tore his eyes away to look at Jack skeptically.
Jack looked tense even with the smile. The corners of his eyes were pinched in a way they only ever were when Jack was trying to hide something. “Keep watching.”
Dread filled him. There were a million things that could go wrong in videos like this. Someone touching wildlife they shouldn’t was common. But the video just moved to an even more familiar beach… with a decidedly unfamiliar pair of bulldozers parked along the dunes.
Bulldozers.
At Playa del Tesoro.
Ahead of a potential sale they claimed wasn’t set in stone.
Jack scrambled to catch the phone as it slipped from Lucky’s fingers. And then he had to try and catch Lucky when his knees went out from him. Right there on the library floor, with a smattering of students suddenly turning eyes to them, Lucky felt like a great white had just blindsided him.
“They’re clearing the land. For the sale. They…” His vision tunneled.
Warm hands settled on his cheeks. Jack pulled him close, drowning him in his familiar cinnamon scent like he could drive the horror from Lucky by sheer force of will.
It worked. It worked because with Jack’s comfort, Lucky pushed past the grief and sank swiftly into a snarling rage. “They are going to sell the land no matter what!” He glared at the library carpet.
“We can’t let this go through, Lucky.” Jack squeezed his arms.
“We won’t.” He agreed, sitting up to look at Jack properly, “You’ve got the turtle group chat still, right?”
“Of course?” It came out like a question, before his brother caught on. “I’ll get everyone to meet us in the quad.” Jack might have opted out of university, but he spent enough time with Lucky to know all the best meeting spots.
Lucky gathered his books and his laptop, haphazardly dumping them into his bag.
His mind was racing. While waiting for the follow-up town hall, he hadn’t even considered they might forge ahead.
This was right out of the Lyrica Beach playbook.
Push, push, push. Until they couldn’t roll it back, until there was no way to stop it.
They were out of time.
He chewed the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Every second spent waiting for his friends to filter in was a second lost. But when they were all gathered, he found himself helpless. Words rose and died on his tongue.
“What’s on your mind, Lucky? Not a plan, just… what do you want to do?” It was Aurora, with her steady hands roughed from years working with machines and engine grease under her nails, that dragged him out of his head. “We’re here for you.”
Serena caught his other hand, squeezing until he thought his fingers would break. He held on just as tight with tears burning his eyes.
“They aren’t going to listen to words.” He started, “I don’t have proof of nesting turtles, I don’t have precedence for environmental protection of the beach.
I think even if I did, they’d find some loopholes to still justify development of the surrounding area.
” Noise would drive the turtles away; they would win either way… “We need to stop them.”
“How?” Jack asked, “I agree, but how? Because right now all I want to do is throw bricks through their windows.”
Lucky laughed wetly, “Not that far, no.”
“But close?” Serena raised a brow, concern twisting her painted pink lips.
“Close.” Lucky agreed, “A protest and…” He brought Serena and Aurora’s hands to his face, holding them to his cheeks, “How about a little civil disobedience?”
“Talking like a real pirate, now.” Aurora grinned, shaking off his hand to pinch his cheek.
“And what exactly does playing pirate entail?” The mischief sparkling in Jack’s eyes only meant trouble. Lucky echoed it with a look of his own.
“All those petition signers… Let’s see if people want to go for round two. Surely the book club could take a beach day, and the knitting clubs, and the woodworkers…” He smiled, an idea forming in his head. “Let’s give these suits a real welcome to the island, hm?”
Lucky laughed as he was dragged into a many armed group hug.
It was a half-baked plan at best. But they were young and stupid and what other options did they have?
He needed to focus his anger somewhere. It was in the charter of the island—if the elected council wouldn’t listen, they would be forced out.
They needed a mutiny.
In the space between night and dawn, when the golden swell across the water hadn’t chased the inky darkness from the sky, Lucky climbed onto the bulldozer.
The chain was heavy as he wound it around the arms bucket.
He threaded it through several different parts so that they couldn’t easily undo his work.
Both ends of the chain came together in front of the bucket.
He filled the front with a few pillows, a seat cushion, and a blanket.
Then he padlocked one end of the chain around his waist. He made sure to wear comfortable clothes.
A loose t-shirt and a pair of shorts that went to his knees, along with a hat to keep the top of his head from burning through the day.
He slathered himself in sunscreen before he arrived and used a scrap of fabric around his wrist as padding to keep the other end of the chain from biting in as he formed it into a shackle.
The keys were on a chain slipped beneath his shirt.
The plan started with a selfie.
He snapped the incriminating picture as soon as the sun came up enough to illuminate the trap they laid. Lucky bared his teeth, barely faking a smile. His sunglasses slipped down his nose, giving the perfect glimpse of his eyes. A second snapshot of the chain around his wrist completed the look.
Jack had written the caption in advance, allowing Lucky to paste it into the social media post. It only took a few seconds before the first heart came in. That’s what they planned for.
First, the Marine Center shared it. Then the university paper, run by Serena.
Social media lit up while Lucky relaxed against the bucket.
By the time the messages started flooding in, the sun had risen on another perfect day in Paradise.
The breeze off the water was refreshing against the golden light working its way over his legs.
The world was still waking up.
Lucky slipped an earbud in. Not his favorite but he needed the ease of removing them once people started showing up. The playlist his friends curated for him, one full of songs they knew he loved, each carefully picked to show their enduring affection.
Twenty-three minutes past six, a car door slammed shut. Then two more. Lucky only opened his eyes when someone blocked the sun.
“Lucky Wilde, what on earth do you think you’re doing?” Alexander Dove with all the pomp and circumstance an elected official could have before eight in the morning glared down at him. The councilwoman for the Verde Cliffs nodded beside him with her crooked ponytail bouncing.
“I could ask you the same thing, Councilman Dove.” Lucky smiled.
“You are trespassing!” A man in a suit ill-fitted to the island sunlight already spilling over the beach was turning red around the collar.
“Mm, last I checked, this is still public land.” Lucky shrugged.
A rattling motor Lucky would know in his sleep pulled off the main road. It didn’t take long for the hovering trio to back up a step at the sight of Teague Wilde coming over the dunes.
“Mr. Wilde, please remove your son before we are forced to…” Nora Alonso trailed off. Lucky didn’t need to look at his dad to picture the man’s expression.
“Forced to what, councilwoman?” They may all be alphas, but Teague was a highly regarded public figure. Threatening him or his pups was the kind of bad publicity no one on the council wanted to deal with.
“Call someone to remove these ridiculous chains!” The man in the suit was one of the representatives for the resort project.
This wasn’t a movie. No one crumbled in the face of his resolve five seconds after it began.
But there was an obvious villain. The suit wearing alpha, now with sweat beading on his brow as the day grew warmer with every minute of sunshine, reached out to grab Lucky’s unshackled arm.
The yank made the chain rattle. It dug into his other wrist and his waist, pinching even through the shirt.
“Unhand my pup before I break your fucking arm.” Teague snarled, as he grabbed the man by his tie. The younger alpha had the brains to release Lucky, but the situation was escalating quickly.
Councilman Dove put himself between Teague and the executive.
Lucky was considering dubbing him Brian.
He looked like a Brian. “There is no need for such behavior! I will… I will call Captain Saavedra. Surely someone from SAR can handle removing the chains and then we can discuss this like reasonable people, yes?”
Lucky loved when a plan went smoothly.