Chapter Text
Riddle Rosehearts was born perfect.
That was the problem.
The universe marked him with five soulmarks the moment he entered the world, each one shining with a newborn’s soft light, each one declaring a future braided into the lives of others. A heart glowed faintly on his ribs, warm and steady. A small spade curled delicately over the inside of his ankle, thin and elegant like ink applied with a careful hand. A diamond shimmered at his hip like a gemstone catching sunlight through water. A clover lay at the base of his neck, gentle and bright, the kind of mark healers always cooed over for the luck it symbolized. And on the inside of his wrist, where his pulse fluttered like a moth’s wings, a tiny crown shimmered in pale gold, as if painted there by the universe itself.
The nurses adored him instantly. They whispered about fate and fortune, about the rare beauty of a child blessed with so many soul-bonds, about the kind of life he would surely lead, surrounded by people who would love him deeply and loyally. They wrapped him in soft blankets and smiled at the symbols peeking from beneath the fabric, as if witnessing something sacred.
His mother did not smile.
She stood by the bed with her arms crossed so tightly it looked as if she were bracing for an impact. Her eyes, sharp and clinical, moved over the marks one by one. When she finally spoke, her voice trembled with something she pretended was restraint but was closer to fury.
“Five,” she said quietly. “Five bonds. Five vulnerabilities.”
No one answered her. The nurses were too busy admiring the child. They did not hear the bitterness in her voice or grasp its meaning. They did not know the context: a husband who had disappeared long before the pregnancy ended, a marriage built on obligation rather than affection, a soulmark on her own skin that belonged to a man she barely loved. They did not know she had spent months terrified she would not be able to love her son either, and how the universe granting him five soul-connections felt like a taunt, a cruel reminder that he might one day find comfort in others rather than in the hollow home she had prepared. They did not know she had already lost one person fate had given her, and she would not allow destiny to take another.
The boy in the bassinet slept peacefully, unaware of the weight of her stare.
That night, when the hospital quieted and the corridors softened into shadows, Riddle’s mother sterilized a small metal plate she had taken from a surgical supply cabinet. Her hands did not tremble, and the steadiness of her movements made the moment all the more terrible. She closed the door behind her with the soft finality of a decision she had already made hours earlier.
The infant startled awake when she picked him up, sensing the coldness before the heat. His face crumpled even before the metal touched his skin. He screamed with the full, helpless force of a child who did not yet understand pain or betrayal, only that both were happening at once. His mother held him firmly and pressed the heated plate to each mark in turn, methodically, clinically, as though she were excising a tumor rather than scarring her own child. She ignored the cries and focused on the task, on the belief that she was preventing something disastrous, that she was saving him from ties that would make him weak, that she was anchoring him to the one person who would always remain: herself.
By morning, the soulmarks were gone.
Not erased, but ruined.
Mutilated into small, puckered scars that no longer resembled anything meaningful. The nurses noticed the redness but believed her explanation about a rash. Babies developed strange marks all the time. They had no reason to suspect anything more sinister.
Riddle grew up with the faint memory of those scars but never connected them to anything beyond being born “delicate,” as his mother phrased it. She made sure he never saw drawings of soulmarks until he was old enough to accept her version of the truth. When he asked why he did not have any, she answered without hesitation, her voice clipped with the disdain she always reserved for anything involving fate.
“You are fortunate,” she told him. “Soulmarks are ridiculous superstitions. They trap people in obligations and fantasies they mistake for destiny. You were spared all that. You were born with a clear purpose, free of the ties that weaken others.”
He never questioned her.
How could he, when he had never seen evidence to the contrary?
He learned early that love was unnecessary, that touch was rare and usually accompanied by silence or reprimand, and that the constant ache in his chest whenever he read about soulbonds in his textbooks was simply another flaw he needed to discipline out of himself. If the universe had wanted him to have companions, surely it would have given him the marks he lacked. The absence felt like fate, and he accepted it the way he accepted everything else in his rigid life: with quiet, lonely resignation.
And somewhere else, four children were born with five soulmarks each, and none of them understood why one of their symbols, the crown, glowed faintly and then dimmed, as if reaching for something that had been taken before it ever had the chance to exist.
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Trey Clover first noticed the crown mark misbehaving when he was ten.
The others all made sense. The heart over his collarbone warmed when he felt genuinely moved by something, the diamond at his side softened with comfort whenever he was at home, the spade near his sternum darkened when he was afraid or ashamed, and the clover on the back of his hand glowed faintly whenever he tried to calm someone else down.
The crown between his shoulder blades did none of those things.
Some days it ached for no reason.
Some days it prickled under hot water as if protesting.
Some days it sat silent and cold, as though nothing in the world could reach it.
He did not tell anyone. There was nothing to tell, really. Nothing concrete. Just a wrongness that was easier to ignore when he had dough to knead and siblings to help herd and bread to pull from the oven. His life was already full of little responsibilities. The idea of worrying his parents with something so abstract felt selfish.
Besides, soulmarks were supposed to make things easier, not harder. That was what he told himself each time the crown twitched like an irritated muscle when he walked past certain places in town without knowing why.
It still flickered on the day he left for NRC, faint and stubborn and slightly sore.
He touched it once through his shirt before stepping into the carriage. Then he lowered his hand, squared his shoulders, and went to school.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
Cater Diamond was the first person at Night Raven College who made Trey feel as if the world would not swallow him whole.
They met at orientation when Cater tripped over the leg of a chair, caught himself on Trey’s arm, and laughed like the entire thing had been intentional,“Whoa, thanks. You’re like, super solid. That’s a good first impression.”
Trey had blinked. “Sorry?”
“Don’t apologize. You saved my face.” Cater flashed a grin. “Cater Diamond. You?”
“Trey Clover.”
“Nice. We match already.”
It was only later, after two days of shared meals and shuffling between confusing buildings, that Cater shoved his sleeves up and Trey’s breath lodged in his throat.
A heart mark sat near Cater’s wrist, the exact same shape and curve as Trey’s. The clover on Cater’s knee, when he mentioned it, responded to his touch the way Trey’s hand mark did. The spade on Cater’s hip, the diamond under his ribs. All familiar. All right.
“Show me?” Cater had asked, eyes wide but soft.
Trey had hesitated, then pushed his collar aside just enough for the heart to show. Cater leaned in, breath warm on Trey’s skin, and Trey’s soulmarks pulsed in quiet recognition.
There was no flash. No dramatic flare. Just a deep, quiet settling inside him, as if someone had adjusted a tilted picture frame in his chest.
Cater swallowed, then laughed a little too loudly.
“Guess the universe likes irony,” he said, lightly. “The four card suits.”
“Four out of five,” Trey repeated, more to himself than to Cater.
They did not talk about the fifth. Not at first.
Nights in the dorm, Trey lay awake and pressed his fingers to the crown at his back. The mark felt strangely muffled, like a heartbeat under layers of cloth. It did not respond to the warm, content feeling he got when Cater flopped onto his bed to complain about assignments. It did not respond when Cater dragged him outside to watch the stars. It did not respond when Cater sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.
The crown remained quiet. Trey decided not to push.
By the end of their first year, Trey and Cater moved around each other with an ease that made other students assume they had grown up together. They naturally filled each other’s silences, picked up conversations where the other left off, and shared jokes with a single look. The marks that matched hummed with something steady and reliable.
The one that did not match hummed with nothing at all.
He told himself that was fine. Some bonds took longer to find. Some never ignited in a lifetime. It did not make the ones he already had any less real.
He said it enough times that he almost believed it.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
Riddle arrived the following year like a storm that had already decided the shape of the landscape it would leave behind.
Trey first saw him standing at the edge of the courtyard, posture straight, uniform immaculate, eyes distant in a way that felt older than a first year had any right to be. There was something coiled in the line of his shoulders. Something tight. Something that looked very much like a person bracing for an impact no one else could see.
By the end of the second week, Riddle was Housewarden. The duel that secured the position was brief and clean, all precise spells and controlled fury. Trey watched from the sidelines, clapping with everyone else because that was what was expected, even as the crown mark between his shoulders pulsed once, sharply, like a startled heartbeat.
He ignored it. When the offer for Vice Housewarden came, Trey accepted.
“Please take care of him,” the previous Housewarden had said, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Someone will need to.”
Trey thought that was dramatic at the time. He did not think so for long. Riddle ran Heartslabyul with exacting efficiency and no tolerance for deviation. He enforced the Queen’s rules with the kind of intensity Trey recognized from medical textbooks more than from people, like a scalpel edge honed too fine. Detentions multiplied. Students fell in line.
Trey tried to help, gently guiding Riddle toward less harsh punishments, suggesting alternatives with the mildness he knew made people listen. Sometimes Riddle took his advice. Usually he did not.
Whenever Riddle stood too close, Trey felt as if something inside him was being sanded raw. His marks did not warm around Riddle. They did not glow. They did not respond in any of the ways tarot books and gossip magazines promised they should around destined people. Instead, the crown at his back prickled, then dulled, then sent a small spike of pressure between his shoulder blades.
Cater noticed it first.
They were cleaning up after an Unbirthday party when Riddle had left, library books tucked under one arm, rules for the week already on his tongue. As soon as the door shut behind him, Cater sagged against a chair.
“My marks get weird around him,” he muttered, rubbing at his throat where his own crown mark lay. “Not cute weird. Just… wrong.”
Trey, still stacking plates, paused. “Wrong how?”
Cater frowned. “Like static. Like when a recording glitches. He walks in and my crown goes fuzzy. Do you feel that?”
Trey shifted his weight. His own crown mark felt like someone had pressed a thumb against it too hard.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I do.”
Cater sighed, long and quiet. “Guess it’s just nerves. He’s scary.”
“Maybe,” Trey said.
The thing was, Trey did not feel scared of Riddle. Not exactly. What he felt was something more complicated. A strange mixture of unease and sharp concern, like watching someone balance a tray full of glassware on a ledge. He knew, intellectually, that if he stepped in too harshly, the tray would fall. He also knew that doing nothing at all meant the same outcome, just later. His crown mark pulsed once more in quiet protest, then fell still.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
By the time Trey and Cater reached their third year, they had accepted that whatever was wrong with their crown marks was not going to resolve itself quickly.
They had also, reluctantly, accepted that Riddle Rosehearts was not going to soften on his own.
“Sometimes I think he just wants us to disappear,” Cater said once, slumping across a common room sofa, phone dangling loosely from his hand. “He passes by me like I’m furniture.”
Trey thought of the fleeting, almost panicked look Riddle sometimes wore when he entered a room and saw them already there. It vanished quickly under the usual composure, but Trey had learned to recognize cracks in masks.
“I do not think he wants us gone,” Trey said, choosing his words carefully. “I think he does not know what to do with us.”
“That makes two of us,” Cater muttered. “I get that he’s high-strung. I know he takes everything personally. But Treyyy…” He groaned, dragging the sound out. “You let him get away with everything. You could say something. You’re allowed to be annoyed when he’s being unfair, you know.”
Trey adjusted his glasses, staring down at the cup in his hand. The clover mark on his palm warmed faintly with the familiar comfort of Cater’s presence. The crown at his back stayed stubbornly numb.
“Someone has to keep things running,” he said. “Arguing with him in front of the others would not help.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Cater said, but there was no real bite in it. He simply looked at Trey with tired eyes. “You feel guilty about him.”
Trey did not respond.
He did not have to.
Cater already knew.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
Deuce Spade arrived at NRC determined to be good.
His mother’s tears had finally cut through the haze of impulsive decisions and petty troublemaking that had defined his middle school years. The soulmarks on his skin felt like promises he had not yet earned, and he went to Night Raven with the quiet, fierce decision that he would be someone they would not be ashamed of when he finally found them.
The heart on his shoulder warmed when he stepped through the mirror. The diamond at his ribs softened when he received his dorm uniform. The clover at his ankle thrummed when his mother hugged him one last time before he left.
The crown over his chest did something stranger. It flared for a heartbeat, then settled into a kind of watchful stillness.
He was too overwhelmed to wonder what that meant.
The first weeks were a blur of rules and schedules and new faces. Deuce found himself in Heartslabyul, under the rule of a Housewarden who seemed to embody discipline itself. Riddle Rosehearts was terrifying, precise, uncompromising. Deuce liked rules. He liked structure. But Riddle’s rules felt like something sharper than that, something that carved into him rather than guiding.
He made mistakes, of course. Late to breakfast once. Misread a line in the Queen’s rules another time. The second infraction earned him a lecture that felt more like being flayed with words than corrected.
He left that meeting with his ears ringing and his chest tight.
“I heard you got chewed out,” a second year student murmured to him in the hallway. “Next time, go to the Vice Housewarden first. Trey’s better about that stuff.”
“Vice… Housewarden?” Deuce echoed.
“Clover. Tall, glasses, bakes all the tarts. Looks like he’s silently judging you but actually he’s nice.”
Deuce hesitated, then took the advice.
The first time he stepped into the Heartslabyul kitchen, the scent of sugar and butter wrapped around him like a blanket. Trey stood at one of the counters, rolling out pastry dough. He looked up when Deuce entered, expression neutral but open.
“Spade, right?” he asked. “Need something?”
Deuce cleared his throat, suddenly feeling twelve again. “I, um. I made a mistake with the rules. I wanted to ask how to fix it before I talk to the Housewarden again.”
Trey studied him for a second, then nodded.
“You came to the right place,” he said. “Sit. I will explain.”
They talked with a tray of tarts between them, the warmth of the oven taking some of the chill from Deuce’s bones. Trey’s explanations were patient, his corrections gentle. Deuce found himself relaxing despite his earlier anxiety.
At some point, Cater wandered in, phone in hand, and joined them with the easy familiarity of someone used to being in every room.
“Hey,” he said, giving Deuce a quick grin. “First year crisis?”
“It was not a crisis,” Deuce protested, then wilted at Trey’s amused look. “Not a big one.”
Cater laughed and hopped up to sit on the counter. “Don’t worry, we all cry at least once here. Some of us multiple times.”
Trey moved to slide the first tray of tarts into the oven. As he leaned forward, his collar slipped just enough to reveal the top edge of a spade-shaped soulmark below his collarbone.
Deuce’s breath caught. His gaze dropped involuntarily to his own chest, where the crown lay over his heart and the spade near his sternum hummed faintly, vibrating in a way it never had before.
Cater followed his gaze. His smile faltered.
“Trey,” he said softly. “Your mark.”
Trey glanced down in confusion, then realized what they were looking at. His movement toward the oven faltered. Deuce stared between him and his own shirt, heart pounding.
“That is…” Deuce tried, voice cracking. “You have—”
“You too?” Trey asked quietly.
Deuce nodded, hand pressing over his sternum. The room suddenly felt too small.
Cater slid off the counter, eyes wide and shining. “You guys are glowing.”
The tarts burned a little at the edges. No one noticed for a long moment.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
Ace Trappola slammed his roommate assignment letter down on the table, and announced that he was underwhelmed. That was Deuce’s first impression.
The second was that Ace was irritatingly attractive in the sort of way that caused trouble in crowded spaces.
The third was that his marks hummed when Ace walked into the room.
They found out about the matching soulmarks the way most first-year boys did: by walking in on each other changing and yelling.
Deuce had been halfway into a clean shirt when the door opened and Ace froze in the doorway. His eyes flicked over Deuce’s torso, then snapped back up to his face, all color draining from his cheeks.
“You have—”
Deuce, mortified, snapped his shirt down, “Knock next time.”
“You have my marks,” Ace blurted, as if the etiquette violation were the second most important thing happening.
Deuce stared at him,“Your what?”
Ace tugged his own shirt up in answer. Heart, diamond, spade, clover. The shapes matched too perfectly to be dismissed as coincidence. Deuce felt his world tip sideways.
Later, they stood in the kitchen with Trey and Cater, all four of them circled around a table that was supposed to hold cooling pastries and instead held far too many emotions.
“So,” Cater said, hands on his hips. “We are all matching.”
“Four of five,” Ace said. “Still missing the crown. Maybe they go to another school. Or they haven’t awakened yet. Or they are dead.” He shrugged, trying to sound flippant. It did not quite work.
Deuce flinched. “Don’t say that.”
Ace rolled his shoulders, “Sorry.”
Trey listened, hands folded loosely, expression thoughtful. His crown mark throbbed in a low, insistent way that made it hard to focus. He kept his voice steady regardless,“Whatever the reason,” he said, “we have each other. That is more than most people get.”
Cater looked at them all, gaze moving from Trey to Deuce to Ace and back again. His smile was smaller than usual but more real,“Yeah,” he agreed. “We do.”
They did not know that their missing crown was only a few corridors away, reviewing the week’s rules and wondering why his chest hurt whenever he thought about the Vice Housewarden and his circle of friends.
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It became a quiet habit to avoid Riddle whenever possible.
It was not intentional at first. Trey had meetings to attend and first years to guide. Cater had social circles to drift through and pictures to take. Ace and Deuce had their own class schedules and detentions to stumble into. Riddle, being in a different year, shared none of their lessons and few of their free periods.
The avoidance only sharpened when they noticed how their marks reacted. Deuce’s crown clenched like a fist whenever Riddle raised his voice at a dorm meeting. Cater’s marks flickered during tea parties where Riddle’s lectures turned sharp. Ace felt a buzzing under his skin too close to anger whenever Riddle’s magic flared. Trey’s crown ached the entire time, a dull, grinding pain he learned to mask.
Riddle read their discomfort in the only way he knew how. He watched the way Trey’s expression tightened when he walked into the room, the way Cater’s smile slipped, the way Ace’s shoulders went sharp, the way Deuce’s eyes dropped to the floor.
He saw them huddled together after meetings, shoulders pressed close, heads bent toward one another as if sharing something sacred. He saw the matching marks on their hands, their throats, their arms, glowing faintly when they laughed. His wrist itched sometimes when he saw them, a faint phantom sensation he chalked up to stress.
He tallied the facts and drew the only conclusion that made sense. They were a soul-family and they did not like him. He didn’t blame them but it did hurt to see them together. He had rules to enforce, standards to uphold because that’s the only meaning he could find when the universe never gave him any. He had a position and he would not fail, even if it meant standing alone.
♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦.♠.♣.♚.♥.♦
The day everything changed began like any other.
Morning roll call, breakfast, lectures, paperwork. Disciplinary notes to sign. A detour to the library. A conversation with a first year who had tried to argue the finer points of the Queen’s rules and gone pale when Riddle corrected him.
He felt tired in the way that settled between bones, not quite exhaustion but something close. The overblot had come and gone weeks ago, leaving behind a hollow he was still learning to navigate. His magic responded sluggishly some days and too keenly on others. The staff said it would pass.
He tried not to notice the way his hands trembled slightly when he poured tea.
He tried not to notice the way his chest loosened, just a little, whenever Trey entered the room. Or the way it tightened again when he remembered Trey belonged to a group that did not include him.
The four of them were in the lounge that afternoon when Riddle stepped in, a stack of forms in hand.
Trey sat at the table, working through some dorm-related spreadsheet. Cater leaned over his shoulder taking a picture of something on his own screen. Deuce had a textbook open, pen tapping against the margin. Ace was half-asleep in a chair, eyes closed, arms folded.
Riddle hesitated, then stepped inside,“I need your signatures on these end-of-week reports,” he said, addressing Trey.
Trey looked up and nodded. “Of course.”
As he reached for the papers, Ace cracked one eye open and glanced toward Riddle. His gaze caught on the edge of Riddle’s sleeve, pulled a little higher than usual.
Riddle had been more careless since the overblot without realizing it. Less meticulous in some of the smaller ways. His cuffs were not buttoned quite as tightly. His collar sat looser on days when the effort of pulling it all together felt like too much.
Ace’s brow furrowed.“Hey,” he said, squinting. “Why do you always wear long sleeves, anyway? It’s not that cold. You embarrassed to show your soulmarks or something?”
Cater winced. “Ace.”
Riddle blinked at him, thrown by the casualness of the question,“I do not have soulmarks,” he said.
Ace laughs first, because that’s who he is — loud, reactive, half a second too quick.
It’s not mean-spirited, just thoughtless, the kind of laugh someone gives when they think they’ve heard something ridiculous.
“Yeah, okay,” he says, leaning back in his chair with casual disbelief. “Everyone has soulmarks. You’re not special.”
The laugh dies in his throat when Riddle looks up. Not sharply. Not with his usual temper. But with a kind of small, tight confusion, like the world has shifted beneath his feet and he’s trying very hard not to show it.
“I don’t,” Riddle says. He says it plainly — no shame, no hesitation, no self-pity. Just a fact he has lived with his entire life.
The words hang there for a moment, suspended in the still air of the Heartslabyul lounge, before the others even process them. Trey’s hands go still atop the stack of reports. Cater lowers his phone mid-scroll. Deuce looks up from the rulebook he had been half-studying. Even Ace straightens in his seat, the remnants of his smirk fading into something warier.
Trey is the first to truly hear the words and something inside him curls, uneasy.
“You don’t… have any?” he asks cautiously, as if maybe Riddle meant something else.
Riddle only nods once, a brisk dip of his chin, as if this clarification should be unnecessary.
Ace blinks, baffled. “You mean like none? Nada? Zero? That’s not—everyone has soulmarks.”
Riddle exhales, and it’s the kind of quiet, tightly managed exhale Trey has learned to recognize as I am keeping myself composed because if I don’t, something will crack. His expression remains controlled but slightly pinched, like he’s bracing for mockery.
He reaches for his sleeve and his movements are mechanical, practiced — the motions of someone who has done this many times, for many people, expecting nothing more than a moment of distaste followed by polite avoidance. He unbuttons the cuff with neat fingers and folds it back, revealing his wrist.
The room falls silent.
Trey feels it in his bones — the shift, the drop, the instant when confusion turns into something colder, heavier, more terrifying. There is no soulmark. Instead, there is a scar, large, uneven, textured with puckered ridges, the pinkish hue unmistakable from where they stand.
Ace stares, all humor gone. “What—what is that?”
Riddle glances down, expression settling back into something almost neutral. He lifts his wrist slightly so they can see it better, as if this is nothing unusual,“Oh,” His tone is mild, almost puzzled by their reaction, “It’s a birthmark. It’s… unsightly, so I cover it when in uniform.”
Trey’s heart doesn’t so much stop as lurch painfully, an organ hitting a wall inside his chest.
He has worked in a bakery since childhood. He has burned himself on pans, on kettles, on ovens. He has seen his siblings burn themselves trying to help. He has treated strangers who blistered their fingers handling hot trays during festivals.
He knows exactly what a burn looks like.
And this— This is a severe burn not a small accident or a fleeting brush of heat but something pressed on purpose, with force, long enough to sear a shape into delicate skin.
“Trey?” Cater whispers, voice thin and trembling, already paling.
Trey swallows, his throat tight and uncooperative. When he speaks, the words break, “Riddle… that’s a burn.”
Riddle blinks, thrown by the tone more than the words.
Then he shakes his head.
“No, it isn’t,” he says firmly. “I’ve had it since I was a baby. It’s just… a mark. Nothing more.”
Cater closes his eyes for a moment, pressing a shaking hand over his mouth as nausea rises thick and fast. Deuce’s grip tightens on the table until the wood creaks, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth might crack. Ace stares fixedly at Riddle’s wrist, color draining from his face as if the scar itself is demanding he look at it.
Trey tries again, more gently,“Riddle… that isn’t a birthmark.”
Riddle stares at their faces — their horror, their discomfort, their swallowed panic — and recoils emotionally, confusion morphing into something small and raw. He feels cornered by an explanation no one is giving him.
His eyes darted between them. He slipped off his shoe and rolled his trouser leg up. A matching scar marred the delicate bone of his ankle, the same size and shape. The skin pulls oddly where it healed too fast or too slow. He reached up and lifted the edge of his hair at the nape of his neck, revealing another, half-hidden by red strands but unmistakable.
Three scars. Three places soulmarks would have been if they had ever been allowed to exist.
Riddle lowers his hand slowly, the hair falling back into place. He turns toward them with a painfully bewildered expression, his voice cracking just slightly under confusion he doesn’t understand.
“I don’t understand,” he says softly. “They’ve always been there. Why—why are you all looking at me like that?”
Trey forces himself to breathe, “Since you were a baby,” he repeats carefully. “You said they’ve looked like this since infancy.”
Riddle nods, growing tenser. “Yes. I told you, I never had soulmarks. These are anomalies, birthmarks. Nothing more. I don’t know why you are reacting so dramatically.”
Trey swallows. He knows what he has to ask.
“Do you,” he begins, voice low and tight, “have any pictures from that time?”
Riddle is still so woefully confused,“My mother took a few,” he admits slowly. “For… milestone documentation. I don’t see why this matters.”
“Please,” Trey murmurs.
Riddle falters at the word — at Trey’s tone, gentler than he’s ever heard it, heavy with something Riddle doesn’t recognize as grief yet. He searches Trey’s face, then Cater’s tight jaw, Deuce’s trembling hands, Ace’s rigid posture.
Something in him yields,“…I’ll get them,” he says quietly. He leaves the room.
The silence he leaves behind feels thick, suffocating.
Cater sinks into his chair, shaking. Deuce rests both hands flat on the table to stop them from trembling. Ace stares at the floor, chest rising and falling too fast. Trey presses a palm between his shoulder blades where the crown mark throbs with a burning ache that feels like grief made physical.
None of them speak. None of them can.
When Riddle returns, he carries a thin, worn hospital-photo album, the edges frayed from years of being shuffled through drawers but rarely, if ever, truly looked at. He sets it down with careful hands, opens it to an early page, and points.
“There,” he says quietly. “Taken when I was a few days old. As you can see, the marks were already there.”
They all lean forward slowly. Trey prays against hope that he is wrong and he’s made his soulmates worked up over nothing.
He is not wrong.
The photo is grainy. The lighting harsh. A newborn lies swaddled in hospital linens, crying so hard his tiny face is mottled red. His fist is curled upward toward the camera.
Around the wrist is blistered flesh, shiny, angry red skin with edges raised. A pattern clearly pressed there, too neat for an accident, too uniform for randomness.
A fresh burn. Maybe hours old, not more. Even worse, matching raw burns peek from the ankle under the blanket. And from the soft skin beneath the infant’s hairline.
Trey feels something inside him rupture, “Those aren’t birthmarks. Those are fresh burns. Hours old. Riddle… that is what a burn looks like when it has just been inflicted.”
Cater makes a sound halfway between a sob and a gag. Deuce swears violently under his breath. Ace takes a step back as if the photo has physically struck him.
“Who did that to you?” Deuce asks, voice hushed but trembling with fury.
Riddle recoils as if slapped. “No one did anything! They’ve always looked like this! You are making assumptions without evidence—I am telling you there is nothing wrong with me!”
“Riddle—” Cater tries again, voice breaking.
“STOP!” Riddle snaps, voice cracking.
He looks terrified — not of them, but of the implications they’re drawing. Of the idea that something might be wrong. That something might have been taken from him. That he might not understand the story of his own body.
“This conversation is inappropriate,” he says, shaking slightly now. “And unnecessary. If you are done analyzing my defects like I’m some… some curiosity, then I would like to go back to work.”
He reached for the album, for the papers, for the shred of dignity he was clinging to.
Ace moved without thinking,“Wait,” he said, and his hand closed around Riddle’s wrist, fingers pressing directly over the scar.
The world seemed to inhale. Riddle inhaled with it, a sharp, shocked gasp that did not fully make it to his lungs before the light exploded.
It did not shine outward in a beam. It spread like cracks in porcelain, veins of pale gold racing from beneath Ace’s fingertips along Riddle’s wrist, up his arm, across his collarbone. The scar flared, the color leaching from its puckered surface replaced by a soft, furious glow.
Ace jerked, his own marks blazing to life in response. The heart near his collarbone burned warm, the diamond at his hip buzzed, the spade on his back seared, the clover on his knee tingled. The crown at his shoulder blade, dormant and dull for years, flared so brightly he almost doubled over.
Deuce cried out, hand flying to his chest as his crown mark erupted in sympathetic light. Cater’s hand flew to his throat. Trey’s head snapped back as the crown between his shoulders roared like a fire finally given air.
Riddle’s eyes went wide. His pupils blew, red iris ringed with white. His lips parted around a sound that never fully formed. The glow intensified, then surged inward, crashing through whatever barriers had been holding it back.
“Riddle!” Trey shouted, already moving.
Riddle swayed once, twice. His knees buckled. For a moment, his whole body seemed to shimmer at the edges, as if something deep inside him were being rewired faster than his nerves could handle.
Then he collapsed.
Trey catches him before he hits the floor, arms wrapping around him instinctively, protectively, as if Riddle is something fragile and irreplaceable – because he is. The room is silent except for the sound of four boys breathing like they’ve been struck.
Their marks glow softly, steadily.
The crown burns brightest on all of them.
And Riddle Rosehearts, who lived his entire life convinced the universe gave him nothing, lies unconscious in the arms of the four souls destiny had always meant for him.