Montana Sky

wrists bound. Night after night she struggled to free herself, felt the cord bite into her flesh as she whimpered and writhed. Smelled her own blood as it trickled down her bare arms.
    Always, just before she pulled herself awake, there was the glint of a knife, that shimmering arc as the blade swept down to work on her.
    Every morning she shoved it away, knowing that, like a rat, it would gnaw free in the night.
    The signs of spring, those early hesitant signs, should have thrilled her. The brave glint of crocus her mother had planted scattered such hopeful color. There was the growing spread of earth where the snow melted back to thinning patches, the sounds of young cattle, the dance of foals in pasture.
    The time to turn the earth was coming, to plant it and watch it grow. And the time when the cottonwoods and aspens and larches would take on a lovely haze of green. The lupine would bloom, and even the high meadows would be bright with it, with the neon signs of Indian paintbrush, with the sunny faces of buttercups.
    The mountains would show more silver than white, and the days would be long again and full of light.
    It was inevitable that winter would whisk back at least once more. But spring snows were different; they lacked the brutal harshness of February’s. Now that the sun wassmiling, bumping the temperature up to the balmy sixties, it was easy to forget how quickly it could change again. And easy to cherish every hour of every bright day.
    From the window of her office, Willa could see Lily. She was never far from Adam these days, had rarely left his side since the night they had come back from high country. Willa watched Lily touch Adam’s shoulder, as she often did, fussing with the sling he wore.
    He was healing. No, she thought, they were healing each other.
    How would it be to have someone that devoted, that much in love, that blind to everything but you? How would it be to feel exactly that same way about someone?
    Scary, she thought, but maybe it would be worth those jiggles of fear and doubt to experience that kind of unfettered emotion. It would be an exhilarating trip, that wild ride on pure feeling, pure need. And more, she realized, beyond the moment, the promise and permanence that was so easily read on the faces of Lily and Adam when they looked at each other.
    The little secret smiles, the signals that were so personal. So theirs. What a thrill, she mused, and what security to know there was someone who would be there for you, always. To have someone who thought of you first, and last.
    Silly, she told herself, and turned away from the window. Daydreaming this way with so much to be done, so much at stake. And she would never be the kind of woman a man thought of first. Even her own father hadn’t thought of her first.
    She could admit that now, here in his office that still held so much of him trapped in the air, like a scent ground into the fibers of carpet. He had never thought of her first, and he had certainly not thought of her last.
    And what was she? Deliberately Willa sat in the chair that was still his, laid her hand on the smooth leather arms where his had rested countless times. What had she ever been to him? A substitute. A poor one at that, she thought, certainly by Jack Mercy’s standards.
    No, not even a substitute, she thought as her hands curledinto fists. A trophy, one of three that he hadn’t even bothered to keep a memento of. Something easily discarded and forgotten, not even worth the space of a snapshot on his desk.
    Not worth as much as the heads of the game kills mounted on the walls.
    The fury, the insult of it was rising up in her so quick, so huge, she didn’t fully realize what she was doing until she’d done it. Until she was up and yanking the first glassy-eyed head from the wall. The left antler of the six-point buck cracked as it hit the floor, and the sound, almost like a gunshot, mobilized her.
    “The hell with it. The hell with him. I’m not a fucking trophy.” She scrambled onto the sofa, tugged at the bighorn sheep that stared at her with canny eyes. “It’s my office now.” Grunting, she heaved the head aside and attacked the next. “It’s my ranch now.”
    Later, she might admit she went a little insane. Pulling, pushing, dragging at the mountings, a macabre task, stripping the walls of those disembodied heads, breaking nails as she pried them loose. Her lips were peeled back in a snarl matching that of the mountain cat she wrestled