Yuan told himself, as he slipped out of the palace grounds well past midnight, that he was only going to observe. That justification lasted exactly as long as it took him to reach the modest street where Lei's watch had confirmed Wu Bin kept lodgings, a narrow building squeezed between a rice merchant's shuttered shop and a public bathhouse gone dark for the night. He stood across the street for a long while, telling himself he would simply watch the windows, note the comings and goings, and report back to Lei in the morning with nothing more than patient observation.
He lasted perhaps twenty minutes before the restlessness that had been building in him for days finally won out entirely.
