For three months, the family of 21-year-old Kaura Taylor has been living in limbo. Taylor vanished from her home outside Dallas this spring with her infant daughter, leaving behind anxious relatives who feared the worst. Their fears seemed to come true when she resurfaced—not back in Texas, but in a Scottish forest, living among the self-proclaimed leaders of a lost “African” tribe.

Taylor insists she is there by choice. In a Facebook post written after her discovery in Jedburgh, a town about 40 miles south of Edinburgh, she rejected the suggestion that she had “disappeared.” “I’m very happy with my King and Queen, I was never missing, I fled a very abusive, toxic family,” she wrote. In a video message, she went further, telling British authorities to leave her alone. “I’m an adult, not a helpless child,” she said.

Her family sees it differently. “It is very stressful, and difficult. It breaks our heart,” her aunt Teri Allen told The Independent. “We’re overly concerned about Kaura, but she doesn’t think anyone is concerned about her.” Allen describes her niece as sheltered, raised in church, and says Taylor only recently began following the group’s leaders online—King Atehene, born Kofi Offeh, a former opera singer from Ghana, and his wife Jean Gasho, who calls herself Queen Nandi.

The couple claim to preside over the “Kingdom of Kubala,” a fringe sect they describe as a lost Hebrew tribe. They believe they are reclaiming land that was taken when Queen Elizabeth I expelled Black Jacobites from England in the late 16th century. From their wooded camp in Scotland, they recruit others—mostly online—who they say belong to the “lost tribes.”

For Taylor’s relatives, it feels more like indoctrination. Her other aunt, Vandora Skinner, remembers when Taylor began distancing herself from the family last year. She stopped attending gatherings, cut off holiday celebrations, and eventually severed communication altogether. By May, she was gone.

“She went missing in May. But she wasn’t missing at all, she left to go live with these people,” Skinner said. The family pieced together her whereabouts through social media posts and conversations with her ex-boyfriend, who said he had balked at the sect’s “ungodly rituals” when Taylor invited him to move abroad.

Taylor, who now calls herself Asnat of Atehene, handmaiden of Queen Nandi, has even suggested in online videos that while she isn’t legally married to King Atehene, she considers herself his second wife. That revelation was especially jarring to her aunts. “Now she’s talking about, she’s married to this man and he can have as many wives as he wants?” Skinner said.

Her family continues to hope she’ll come back home. Taylor, however, shows no signs of leaving the Scottish forest.