  This article is dedicated to the characterisation of the relative
hyperbolicity of Haglund and Wise's special groups. More precise, we introduce
a new combinatorial formalism to study (virtually) special groups, and we prove
that, given a cocompact special group $G$ and a finite collection of subgroups
$\mathcal{H}$, then $G$ is hyperbolic relative to $\mathcal{H}$ if and only if
(i) each subgroup of $\mathcal{H}$ is convex-cocompact, (ii) $\mathcal{H}$ is
an almost malnormal collection, and (iii) every non-virtually cyclic abelian
subgroup of $G$ is contained in a conjugate of some group of $\mathcal{H}$. As
an application, we show that a virtually cocompact special group is hyperbolic
relative to abelian subgroups if and only if it does not contain $\mathbb{F}_2
\times \mathbb{Z}$.
