Meet Dani Matthews

Who Is Dani Matthews, Really?

On the surface, Dani Matthews is exactly what Dominion wants her to be: a successful investigative reporter for a respected outlet, an educated woman thriving in a world designed by and for women. But from the opening pages of Dominion: Ascension, we see that Dani is carrying a private war inside herself—between loyalty to her mother and loyalty to the truth, between the safety of silence and the danger of asking the wrong questions.

Dani’s journey begins with a mystery that most of Dominion has already decided to forget: the death of her father. Officially, he died of a ruptured aneurysm, a neat and tidy explanation that never sat right with his daughter. Over time, Dani’s doubt hardened into obsession, then into a vocation—she becomes an investigative reporter because she cannot live in a world where uncomfortable truths are conveniently edited out. Her work is not a career pivot; it is a quiet act of rebellion.

Her relationship with her mother, Linda, is the emotional fault line that runs through the book. Linda is a brilliant scientist whose early work on intelligence testing was intended to remove bias and expand opportunity, especially for marginalized communities. Those same methods are later weaponized into Illegis, the system that fences men into fixed roles and locks an entire gender into state-managed destinies. Where Dominion sees Linda as a savior, Dani sees a woman who helped build a cage—and then chose to stay proud of it.

That tension between mother and daughter is more than personal drama; it’s a mirror of the world they inhabit. Dominion is a nation that rose out of devastation after The Great War, when bioweapons left many men infertile and cognitively impaired. The solution was drastic: women assumed full political control, and the state created a “rational” system to assign men to one of several tracks, including the highly controlled Breeders. Dani has only ever known this world, yet something in her refuses to accept that justice requires stripping others of the right to choose their own lives.

I wrote Dani to embody the questions Dominion doesn’t want to ask itself. What happens when liberation for one group is built on quiet oppression of another? How far can we go in the name of safety before we lose the very humanity we claim to protect? Dani is not a perfect heroine; she is impulsive, stubborn, and at times ruled by anger and regret. She imagines violent acts she would never commit, resents her mother, and second-guesses herself more than she would ever admit in public. But that mix of courage and conflict is what makes her the right person to step into the dangerous spaces Dominion prefers to leave in the dark.

As the story unfolds, Dani’s work as a reporter drags her deeper into the inner workings of the Breeder system, transformation camps, and resistance groups like Hangar 8. Every new piece of information forces her to choose: will she protect her own comfort and her mother’s legacy, or will she follow the story wherever it leads—even if that means exposing the truth about the world that raised her? In many ways, Dominique’s future depends less on its laws and more on what Dani decides to do with what she knows.[
If you’ve ever felt caught between the story your family tells and the reality you feel in your bones, I suspect you will recognize something of yourself in Dani Matthews. Dominion may be a speculative world, but Dani’s longing—for truth, for justice, for a way to love her mother without becoming her—is deeply human.