The Five Stitches

A rhyme whispered in childhood.
A pair of swan-neck scissors.
Five stitches, five bodies, one broken boy.

Pasha has always lived by patterns—promises measured in numbers, rituals carried in reverence, and a rhyme his mother sang as she sewed by lamplight: Snip for the liar, snip for the thief, snip for the silence that hides beneath. He remembers every line. He believes in its symmetry. And he knows the pattern is not finished until five threads are cut, five knots tied, five lives ended. Only then, he thinks, can the torn fabric of his family be made whole again.

When Illya is found dead in his flat, scissors gleaming on the windowsill and a single blue thread left behind, Detective-Sergeant Barinov begins to trace a story woven in secrecy. At school, Pasha drifts into the orbit of Vanya, their pact sharp and restless, stitched together by bruises, bargains, and loyalty. But with each thread Pasha ties, another mark appears, another name waits, and the rhyme draws closer to its end.

The Five Stitches is a novel of adolescence edged with menace, where friendship and obsession blur into ritual murder, and where the attempt to mend what is broken may unravel everything.