Luke's PoV

I woke up in agonizing pain and couldn't see anything. My hands were shackled behind my back and I was still naked. I thought I could feel grass and dirt underneath and I definitely could hear a lot of cars flying by. I carefully tried to stand and regretted it as one of my ankles felt like it was broken. I kept my weight on the other leg and waited. If I was naked on a highway, someone would see me and offer help any minute now. Eventually someone tried to approach me and I sank to my knees in relief.
"Hey there sir, I'm a police officer, I'm just going to approach so I can take off your blind fold and offer you a blanket, are you in pain, do you know where you are or what your name is?" they said as they slowly approached.
"My name is Luke, I was kidnapped by my girlfriend's sadistic father, my ankle hurts like it's broken and my shoulder also hurts" I said as the blind fold was removed and a blanket was provided for me while someone carefully broke my shackles with some metal clippers. They then carefully got me to sit down so that they could assess my body. There were three police officers, one female and two males.
"Alright Luke, you have bruises all over your body and we don't want to cause more harm than good so just lay here, an ambulance is on its way with a stretcher. We will get you to the hospital and they will sort you out. Is there anyone we can call for you?" they asked.
"Trevor Wilson" I mumbled before passing out due to the pain.

When I came to, I was in a hospital bed with Reggie and Alex passed out on top of my lap, Bobby was asleep in a recliner. "Guys, wake up, where's Julie?" I asked but my voice was hoarse from disuse. Thankfully they heard anyway and woke up one at a time.
"Hey Luke, you're awake, how are you feeling?" Reggie asked as he wiped sleep from his eyes.
"Where's Julie?" I asked urgently as I tried to sit up. That set off a bunch of beeping sounds and a nurse ran in and pushed me back down gently and started running a bunch of tests on my body.
"We only found you Luke, we have no idea where she is but we are looking all over the country for her, we were hoping you would be able to help by giving insight to where you were kept" Alex said sadly.
Julie was still there, in that hell hole while I was safe, in a hospital, beaten up but safe. I tried to sit up again but the nurse just pushed me gently down and I caught her name badge.
"Look please, Lucy is it, please let me talk to the police, any one, I have to help, she's still in that hellhole and she needs to be found, after my report I promise I'll lay here for as long as you want without complaint and be the best sick person for you" I said as I gently held her hand. She nodded and left to presumably retrieve the police. They walked in a few minutes later behind her.

"Luke, what can you tell us of where you were kept, every detail could help, the color of the wall, even the smell, how long it took you to get there, anything" the police lady asked as she passed me a coffee.
I took a few sips then began talking.
"We were an hour away from our house when we were taken, I had seen her being carried out by her father and she looked like she had been drugged. When I took a few steps to follow I was then injected in my neck by presumably the same substance. We both woke up in the same room feeling groggy like we had been hit by a baseball bat several times to the head. I'm not sure how much time had passed but if I was found in Mexico, it's safe to say we were knocked out for the entire trip so you could be looking for a vehicle that made that trip recently. The walls were gray, like a cell, with cell bars and a cell door. There wasn't anything on either side except a drain. We were locked in on one side and on the other, the only difference was a door. There were bolted bar's on the ground where we were shackled later on. When I woke, I was already shackled and it could electrocute me, that hurt a lot. There were no windows and Ray Molina had at least three other men helping him pull this torture room off. They drowned us for what felt like hours while forcing our bodies to cum, I guess they hoped the exhaustion from constantly holding our breath would kick in or us cumming would cause us to choke and then we wouldn't be able to hold our breaths. Eventually they let us go but kept Julie shackled in the other room with the wall of cell bars between us. We could barely touch each other's fingertips. When we nearly passed out, the lights were turned up to full blast and music blared at us, the same song over and over. They came in hours later, broke a few of my bones, kicked me around then I felt myself being drugged again. That was when I woke up on the highway" I finished. I took a few more sips of my coffee as the police wrote all of that down.
"Thank you Luke, you gave us a lot to work with, some very specific details there of cell bars, yet a room that could produce music as well as electrocute. This has helped a lot, now please rest, get better, alright?" the lady said. I nodded and laid back down after leaving the coffee on the bed side table. The police left and Lucy followed to find a doctor for me.

"We are going to get you the best help Luke, a therapist, the best doctors, anything you want" Bobby said.
"I don't care, I just want Julie, she's still there in that hellhole. That was day one, he's going to kill her, how long was I asleep for"
"You were out for maybe a day, your body was still fighting off whatever drug was running through your system" said Alex sympathetically.

A doctor came in, filled me in on what was broken, adjusted my pain killers and told me to rest as much as possible before leaving and pushing the guys out of my room. I was left alone to sleep but found it nearly impossible to do. All I could see was Julie's face, tears streaming down her cheeks as she reached to touch my fingertips with hers.

After about a week, I was released under the supervision of Bobby to make sure I took it slow. Apparently instead of laying around a hospital, I could lay around his house instead. There was no word on Julie and it was infuriating. The news spoke about her every night, the radio constantly mentioned her name and description and we were constantly getting calls from people who thought they saw her but were cold leads. I couldn't check them out myself as I was currently on bed rest but every time they came back, it looked like a part of their soul had been stolen also.

Two months later…

No news but I finally could walk around. I just had to take it easy since my cracked rib was still on the mend. I helped out by preparing food for when they came back from the station, Reggie, Alex and Bobby, practically lived there. I no longer made messes either, there was nothing to be joyous about, nothing to distract me from making food. They had found the room that I had described within hours but unfortunately they had left with Julie before the police had arrived. It had been an abandoned warehouse which thankfully had one camera so we got a license plate but a few hours later, that turned up cold too with them changing cars under a bridge that had no camera. That was the day I broke my guitar, the one my mother had given to me. I was laying in bed playing it when I got the news on speaker phone. I had thrown it against the wall and cried myself to sleep. A kind nurse had picked up the pieces and gave them over to Reggie and Alex who paid a lot of money to have it restored.

Three months since we lost Julie…

We were supposed to be in Hawaii right now, soaking up the sun rays, drinking margaritas by the beach, having massages, enjoying life. This was my present to Julie and she wasn't here to enjoy it. Bobby thought maybe we should go anyway, to help our mental health but I couldn't help but mope. I didn't want to be here, relaxing while she could be potentially suffering. I knew deep down that it was getting to the point where I might have to come to grips with her death.

Reggie and Alex were still trying to find her but Bobby had resigned himself to searching for a body now. I was currently at the beach pretending I was relaxing while really I was looking on the internet, checking my emails every few minutes for any sign of a lead. I had hidden it behind a magazine and had gotten away with this for the past hour. I was pretty sure Reggie knew and had distracted Bobby from seeing. He wanted her back, we all did. Why did I let her out of my sight? I said I wouldn't but I thought we could relax, I thought her father had left our lives forever.

Nine months later…

We are looking for a body now, there's no way she could be alive so we have been checking every grave site with the police, looking in every dumpster, abandoned building and rivers. Bobby had been looking a lot longer and had passed over his notes to us to continue checking these areas. If nothing showed up in the next few months, the next and final stage was to accept that maybe her body was slowly dissolved piece by piece into the water system by acid. That image had kept me up the last few nights with nightmares as I knew if that was an option, he wouldn't kill her first, that would be too kind, he would hold her hand in and watch it dissolve away in the acid, relishing in her screams.

We were now all eighteen, legally we could make decisions for ourselves so I was informed of every detail rather than kept from the gory potential outcomes. Bobby didn't approve but it was my right to know what was being discussed or planned. Julie would be turning eighteen in three months if she was somewhere out there. I hardly slept any more, hardly ate, I had lost a lot of weight and the only time I really remembered to eat is if I was stuck waiting for something and food or liquid was in front of me. Drinking water also was an issue and I constantly had headaches from lack of hydration. I had collapsed at one point and was sent to the hospital where I was connected up to fluid and told to be more careful. I decided if we couldn't find a body, then she had to be alive, somewhere, holding on, barely, waiting for me to find her.

The only person who I still really talked to was her little brother who stayed with us now also. We had questioned every member of her extended family, found a few new places to look at but all had come up with nothing. He was the only one who never gave up hope from the start. He never left me alone either, I probably would have died from starvation if he wasn't constantly at my side making sure I consumed a bite here and there of something.
"What if we are looking in the wrong way?" he said as he spun around his chair with a bagel in his hand.
I looked up from my hands that were hiding tears and gave him a pointed look.
"Well we are looking in all the places you hide a person, what if she's in plain sight, like a hotel or something. What if that's the reason we haven't found her is because she's been close by us the whole time, under our noses and we have just been blind all along. What if he changed her appearance also so no one recognizes her?"
"Dude you watch way too many movies but I love it, where do we start?" I asked. Alex and Reggie had come over, curious about our new energy and Carlos jumped up to pull a map of the city out.
"Why don't we pull in the army, every police officer possible, FBI, and we hit every building in the city at the same time in the middle of the night. That way if I'm right, he doesn't have a way to hide if he gets a heads up that we are searching the city. It has to be kept on the down low and be carefully planned. Could we get Bobby to install extra cameras to pick up blind spots around the city?"
"Yeah kiddo we could" I replied. Alex and Reggie had run off to find Bobby and some officers for help as we started drawing up a plan of how this could work to cover all our bases.
Then I was stumped, "Carlos, if he changed her appearance, how do we know that it's her?"
"We won't, that's why we need everyone to be looking for any one, bringing them in and checking their DNA, I'll run to the lab and give them a sample of mine that should match hers. If you haven't finished that bagel by the time I get back, I'm shoving it down your mouth Luke"

I shook my head as the mouthy youngster took off. Unfortunately he had been forced to grow up and grow up fast. I did as he asked and started brainstorming hotels nearby.

Three years later….

I was twenty one now, Carlos' plan had worked brilliantly but Julie wasn't to be found. We continued that plan by hitting random cities across America, South America then Canada. Nothing, it was a massive area, a long shot and we had drained a lot of Bobby's funds in doing so. Around half way through though, people started to donate to help. Nothing showed up though, we had millions of people digging holes in the ground looking for her across the area from Argentina to Alaska. We knew he couldn't fly so he had to be somewhere on that land mass but the problem was it was huge. He also could have just buried her off of the side of a road in the middle of nowhere. Everyone slowly gave up over the years, I still held hope that maybe one day we would get a call but I had resigned myself to not going into the station any more. Carlos would soon be sixteen and we needed to look to the future not the past. It was time for us to move on, accept that maybe we would never know as much as it pained me.

Bobby had made a burial site for her, it had a beautiful statue of her singing into a mic as a head stone and I carried fresh flowers to her empty grave every week at sunset. I really hadn't moved on but for everyone else, I tried to eat, drink, sleep, even smile occasionally.

Everyone was currently doing flips off the back of a diving board while Carlos flirted with some girl he had a crush on. I hid behind my shades and wondered back to when I had Julie last in my arms. Everyone else around me was happy, laughing, cooking food, and busy. They hadn't seen me get up off my recliner, head inside and up to Bobbies bathroom. If I couldn't have her, I couldn't move on, then maybe it was time I was officially dead and dead for good. I pulled out his pills and glanced at the labels. They were a mix of painkillers and sleep tablets. I emptied my glass of whisky and refilled it with some water and swallowed the first five tablets in one go.