Page 1 of Before the Storm
PROLOGUE
THREE YEARS AGO…
A Small Town in Arizona
Sister Aura Margret Bueller folded her hands in her lap and lowered her head as she did before every meal. Her heart hammered in her chest like it never had before. She was no longer peaceful. She no longer wanted this life. It wasn’t her calling.
It never had been.
Her life had been a lie and it had been spoon-fed to her by her father.
Brother Jim, her spiritual husband—as he was called in her culture—sat at the head of the table while her sister wives occupied either the seat next to her or across from her, doing the same thing.
They were obedient wives, unlike Janelle, who had begun to question the doctrine and the very fiber of their way of life.
That hadn’t gone over well with her husband and especially her father.
The twelve children who still lived at home were all situated at another table except the two babies. They were in bassinets near their birth mothers.
Although all the wives were considered moms. They all helped to take care of and raise the children. It was their duty as women under the watchful eye of the Lord.
But Aura didn’t feel like a mother.
Nor did she want to be one.
Not at twenty-three.
She’d been pregnant four times. Three miscarriages and one stillbirth. Brother Jim said she was a complete and utter failure as a wife. He had been so disappointed in her inability to give him another child that he’d stopped visiting her and told her she needed to pray harder and that when God was ready for her to achieve her true calling, he’d come to Brother Jim and make his wishes be known.
Immediately, she stopped praying altogether.
If there was a God, she no longer believed.
She had no faith at all. Not in the religion that she was born and raised with. Not in polygamy, something she once thought she valued and respected. Not in her family.
And certainly not in the head of her church, who happened to be her father.
“Amen,” Jim said. However, she had no idea what words he had uttered before, nor did she care.
There was only one thing she cared about, and that was getting out of this godforsaken hellhole.
“Sister Aura, did you have a nice visit with your father today?” her husband asked. The sound of his voice made her shiver with disgust.
She stared at the plate of food, her stomach in knots. She’d spent her entire life living in this compound and doing her best to live and breathe the doctrine. The only times she’d everstepped foot outside the walls had been when she’d gone to the hospital during complications of childbirth three months ago.
That’s when she’d met the woman who had put a single thought in her brain that she couldn’t get out.
“Yes, Brother Jim,” she said, keeping her gaze lowered. He’d blamed her for not having a strong enough faith.
Well, he wasn’t wrong about her belief system.
That died the moment her father had told her she was to marry a forty-year-old man when she’d only been seventeen.
Oddly, it wasn’t the fact that he had other wives. That hadn’t bothered her at all. The idea of sister wives had been normal and something she planned on living. Her mother had been one of three wives. For the first ten years of Aura’s life, she believed the polygamy lifestyle had been one of choice. One that a woman chose for herself when she came of age. And that was probably true for many in her type of faith.
However, shortly after her biological mother passed, her father took on a much younger wife and a fundamental shift in the church began.
Although, at first, that didn’t even seem weird. Ten years wasn’t that big of a deal between a husband and his wife.
