Author's Note: I decided to jump on the band wagon and join the craze of giving Riley a traumatic childhood. So... yeah.
Rated for language...

Memories of a Broken Childhood

The young boy peered cautiously through the open doorway, his eyes wide with fear. He could not see the people in the room—only their shadows on the wall, and even those were blurry without his glasses—but accompanied by their shouts, he knew enough. One of the shadows reached out and struck the other across the face. There was a lull in the shouts, and then they took up again with more ferocity than before.

He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a girl several years his senior. She knelt beside him and pulled him into a hug, rocking him back and forth, her eyes fixed fearfully on the shadows of the quarreling adults as he buried his face into her shoulder. As the argument in the next room continued to escalate further, she stood, took him by the hand, and led him upstairs, closing the door to her room in an attempt to mute the din from below.

Presently, the man’s voice stopped yelling, but the woman’s continued shrieking as heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs. The little boy clung to his sister, tears welling in his eyes. Too young to understand exactly what was happening, he knew something in his home was seriously wrong, and had been for quite some time. Inwardly, he knew things were getting no better, only worse. The doorknob jiggled, but it was locked.

“You had better open this fucking door, you bitch!”

The little boy whimpered as his sister released him from the embrace, hurriedly making her way to the door and unlocking it. It slammed open, and their father shoved the girl out of the way, pointing an accusing finger at the boy.

“Get the hell out, you little shit.”

Petrified, the boy didn’t move, but as his father raised an open hand, he darted from the room. He stole a single, fearful glance over his shoulder and caught a brief glimpse of his sister’s tear-stained face before the door slammed shut once more. He ran down the stairs and found comfort in the waiting arms of his mother. One of her eyes was blackened, and her cheeks and arms were black and blue with bruises. A small trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. She held her son close, whispering comforting words in his ear. To him, she wasn’t a broken woman; she was an angel, and while he was in her arms, nothing could hurt him.

She pulled a pair of glasses from the pocket of the apron she wore and handed them to him. One of the lenses was badly scratched, the other cracked; the two halves of the frame were held together by Scotch tape. She began speaking frantically as shouts and cries came from upstairs; her voice was hysterical, only half the words she spoke coherent. She took her son by the hand, and, grabbing her husband’s wallet from its place on the kitchen counter, she fled the house, the little boy struggling to keep up with her as her feet pounded on the pavement of the sidewalk.

That was all so long ago. Memories of a broken childhood still haunted the boy, now a grown man, to this day. He had found out several years later that his father had been imprisoned for the abuse of his mother and sister, abuse that led to his sister’s early death. Each year, his New Years’ resolution had been to put the past behind him, but still, the memories haunted him. Still, the sounds of terrified screams and angry shouts rang in his ears as he slept. But now he had been given a chance to find a better life for himself and for his mother. The chance of a lifetime, the chance to find a treasure worth millions of dollars…. Riley knew it was too good to be true, but what did he have to lose?