Those Who Wish Me Dead Read Online Free

you live in that has a blizzard the last day of May, Serbin?”
    She was almost as tall as him; her blond hair streamed out from under a ski cap, and her blue eyes watered in the stinging wind.
    “They have these things,” he said, “called weather forecasts? They’re new, I guess, experimental, but it’s still worth checking them, time to time. Like, oh, before driving over a mountain range at night.”
    She smiled and offered a gloved hand, and they shook.
    “I heard the forecast, but I figured I could beat the storm. Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m keeping my positive mental attitude.”
    That was one of the seven priorities for survival Ethan had taught in the course Jamie had taken. The first priority, in fact.
    “Glad you’ve retained your lessons. What are you doing here, anyhow?”
    Claude Kitna was watching them with interest, staying at a courteous distance but not so far away that he couldn’t overhear the conversation. Farther up the road, the headlights of another plow truck showed, this one returning from the pass gate, which would now be shut and locked, the Beartooth Highway closed to all traffic. They’d opened the pass for the first time that season just four days earlier. Last year, it had been closed until June 20. The wilderness was more accessible now than it had once been, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still the wilderness.
    “I’ve got a proposition for you,” Jamie said. “A request. You may not like it, but I want you to hear me out, at least.”
    “It’s a promising start,” Ethan said. “Any job that arrives with a blizzard has to bring good things.”
    It was a joke then. There in the wind and the snow and the orange signal flares, it was only a joke. Weeks later, though, in the sun and the smoke, he would remember that line, and it would turn him cold.

3
    B y the time they got back to the cabin, Allison had a fire going in the woodstove.
    “You want me to start the generator?” she said. “Get the lights back on?”
    “It’s fine,” Jamie said.
    “Get you some coffee, at least?” Allison said. “Warm you up a little?”
    “I’d take a bourbon or something, actually. If you have any.”
    “Like I said—coffee,” Allison told her with a smile, and then she poured Maker’s Mark into a steaming mug of coffee and offered it to Jamie, who was still trying to get her jacket and gloves off, shedding snow that melted into pooled water on the floorboards in front of the stove.
    “Now you’re talking. Thank you. It is frigid out there. You really stay here year-round?”
    Ethan smiled. “That’s right.”
    Allison offered Ethan a cup of coffee as well, and he accepted the warm mug gratefully, rotated it in his hands. Even through top-of-the-line gloves, the wind could find your joints. Allison’s eyes were searching his, looking for a reason this woman had blown in with the storm. He gave the smallest of headshakes. She understood that he still had no idea.
    “Gorgeous place,” Jamie said, sipping the whiskey-laced coffee. “You said you guys built it yourselves?”
    “Yes. With some help.”
    “You give it a name? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a ranch?”
    He smiled. “It’s not a ranch. But we call it the Ritz.”
    “Seems a little rustic for that.”
    “That’s the idea,” Allison said. “That’s the joke.”
    Jamie glanced at her and nodded. “Sorry about this, by the way. Crashing in during the night, during the storm. Invading the Ritz.”
    “Must be important,” Allison said. She was wearing loose sweatpants and a tighter, long-sleeved top. She was barefoot, and Jamie Bennett had at least six inches on her. The storm didn’t concern Allison—she was old Montana, third generation, a rancher’s daughter—but Ethan had the sense that Jamie did, somehow. And not because she’d arrived in the middle of the night. Allison was used to those kinds of calls.
    “It is,” Jamie said, and turned back to Ethan. “You still